The Mercy of Darkness
by The Ducky Pirate
Summary: She called it mercy. They all knew it wasn't. AU KotOR, in which a warlord's redemption comes at a price, and an old soldier finds a reason to believe. Initial LSF!Revan/Carth, eventual Revan/Canderous. Warning: This isn't the walkthrough you're looking for.
1. Endar Spire

_She felt a vast, ravening terror as the void closed in around her, inside her, and knew there was only one way to escape the terrible fate of Oblivion that threatened her. One way: the way of pain, of fury, of darkness. When she embraced it, she found it merciful; but the awful noise pounding through her skull hadn't abated with the looming Oblivion, and it tore her away from the force-cloak of her darkness-_

The terror-sickness was waiting, she thought, but no, the blaring noise filling her skull was actually the ship's battle alert. Real. Lethe stumbled out of her cot, welcoming the cold of the durasteel deck under her bare feet, even if the ship was shuddering under fire. It was something solid to focus on, better than the…Lethe frowned. She couldn't remember. She had…dreamed something, but whatever it had been, all she had left of it was a dizzy kind of headache that made her want to sick up somewhere. _Not unlike a wild night with a Zeltron joy-boy from Nar Shadaa. _

Where were her clothes, again?

The doors hissed open just as Lethe was turning around to look for her wayward wardrobe, to admit who must have been one of her crewmates. She dressed in a hurry while he caught her up to speed – she had a male bunkmate? - and then they were sprinting down the corridors towards the command deck, only to run headlong into part of the Sith boarding party. Lethe reacted, cut down two of them with her vibrosword while Trask opened fire on the grenadier.

The _Endar Spire_ took another hit, throwing Lethe against the bulkheads and pitching her companion backwards onto the deck. A gas grenade went off. Trask was quicker getting up; he grabbed her bicep and hauled her to her feet, dragging her, half stumbling, through another set of doors as the bio-gas started an overproduction of mucus in her nose and throat and she began to choke and spit, eyes watering.

She'd taken a wound somehow, could feel the sticky heat of blood on her ribs even if it didn't hurt yet, and she hoped it wasn't a lung.

"_This is Carth Onasi,"_ a voice coming from her comlink said_ "– the Sith are threatening to overrun our position! We can't hold out long against their firepower! All hands to the bridge!"_

Ulgo hacked out an explanation about the personal communicators – she didn't have the air to snap that this wasn't her first Swoop race – and then they were at the bridge.

"There's no one here," Lethe said. She wished she had an antidote kit, even if it would make her vomit up the mucus and toxins slogging her system.

Ulgo was opening the far door. She went after him, and tried to scream at him to come back when he bum rushed the Dark Jedi inside. She ended up vomiting yellow-green sludge on her boots.

"I'll hold him off!" Ulgo yelled over his shoulder, and the ship bucked under another explosion. Lethe threw herself under the computer bank – _fool, what if it explodes_ – as half the ceiling came crashing down in front of the doors. The doors' control panel burst into a shower of sparks, instantly closing off the passage. Smoke and the smell of fried wiring rolled through the suddenly too small space.

Lethe stumbled through one of the other doors, hacking and drooling into her sleeve, her eyes still watering from the smoke and the poison.

A burn had taken up residence somewhere in her chest, throbbing in time with her erratically hammering heart: likely the source of her wound, but there wasn't time to check it. She had to get away from the bridge before that Sith came through the doors.

"_This is Carth Onasi on your personal communicator,"_ said the voice again, "_I'm tracking your position through the Endar Spire's life support systems_. _Bastilla's escape pod is away – you're the last surviving crew member of the Endar Spire! I can't wait for you much longer; you have to get to the escape pods!_"

_Keep talking, you sexy, sexy voice_, Lethe thought. She could follow the direction of the broadcast towards the pods even if she couldn't see frack-all through the smoke and the blown lighting. Down another hall, and she had to fetch up against a bulkhead, gulping in precious oxygen from the ship's failing systems. The next room had to be the last one.

"_Be careful!"_

Lethe pulled her hand back from the door controls, pressed it instead to the center of the pain. She could feel wet heat seeping through her uniform.

"_There's a whole squad of Sith Troopers on the other side of that door! You need to find some way to thin their numbers!" _the voice continued.

Lethe cast about the room and caught sight of an inactive assault droid. Lethe fumbled at her belt for her repair parts, numb fingers slipping ineffectually against the catch on one of the utility pouches. She didn't have time for this. She went for the computer console instead, thinking she could overload the power conduit in the next room, but the damned catches on her damned standard issue belt were in the way of her damned shaking hands. _Frack this_, she thought, and shed her vest, mashing the detonation controls on the grenades with her closed fist, and slammed her shoulder into the door controls until they opened. She tossed the vest, grenades and all, and waited for the screaming to stop. It didn't take long. She nearly fell through the open doors, used the fallen durasteel support beams to drag herself through to the pod bay.

The last doors opened just as she reached them, and Lethe succumbed to unconsciousness.

* * *

_A/N: Lethe Dashao= Revan. R&R, if you'd be so kind._


	2. Taris: A Stray Thought

**A/N:** The things you don't recognize are probably the result of me making things up. I've been wanting to give the canon a good rogering since the Revan book came out...well, since the prequels happened, really. Everything you do recognize is owned by Lucas. Or Disney, as the case may be. Thanks for stopping by, and I encourage you to let me know what I could do better or what I did well. I'll return the favor :)

* * *

_The young Jedi fought well, but she was no match for the dark force that stalked her, prowling the edges of the battle like a Kodan lion. With a fierce cry, the Jedi came on, her pale blade flashing, but she was beaten back again and again. She would fall. She must fall. The darkness was reaching for her, and just as it seemed it must take her whole, everything vanished into light. And it __**burned**_.

Lethe sat straight up, the scream in her throat coming out a weak cough. Someone was there beside her, there were hands on her, and she struggled _against the darkness, all was lost if they failed!_ but the voice speaking to her wasn't…wasn't…

"It's okay, just drink slowly. You've been out for about three days."

The voice from the ship? And there _was_ a glass of water pressed into her hand, against her lips, and she quit fighting and drank. Then: "What happened?" She was pleased her voice didn't sound as bad as she felt.

"That smack to your head must've done more damage than I thought. I'm Carth Onasi, one of the soldiers from the _Endar Spire_. I was with you in the escape pod. Do you remember?"

"Just your voice," Lethe said, finally shaking off enough of whatever fit she'd just had to get a good look at the man. _The sexy voice_, she had called him as she'd careened through the wreckage of the _Spire_. He matched. Suddenly realizing how very close he was, she asked, "Where are we?"

"On the city-planet Taris," he said. "It's under Sith occupation. They've declared martial law and imposed a planet-wide quarantine. I managed to pull us from the wreckage of the pods and get us into this abandoned apartment, but it wasn't long before they were crawling with Sith. You were injured pretty badly; I was starting to wonder if you were ever going to wake up. I'm really going to need your help if we're going to find Bastila. Her pod must've crashed somewhere on the planet, but there hasn't been any word. Your record said you were a smuggler before joining the war effort; those skills will certainly come in handy in finding a way off this rock."

_City-planet Taris. Sith occupation. Injured? Pod crash…Bastila?_ Lethe's head started to swim, and she found herself falling forward, the glass of water tumbling from her hand.

Carth caught her easily. "Whoa," he said, "Hey, easy. I'm sorry. It must be a lot to process all at once."

"I think you're right about hitting my head harder than I thought," Lethe joked when the world stopped spinning. He smelled nice. She probably smelled awful. Feeling ridiculous, Lethe let go of Carth. "You said three days? I probably need a shower. Does the 'fresher work?"

"It does, surprisingly. You wouldn't think so in an abandoned apartment, but-" Carth stopped.

Lethe was glad he didn't give her any more information to process. Her head still felt fuzzy, and she was sure she wouldn't be able to do any serious thinking until she'd at least splashed her face with water. Caffa would be better, but she felt bad enough needing Carth's help making it across the room to ask for anything else. Her legs were shaking too badly to walk a straight line.

The ice cold water was a welcome shock to her system, and even with only standard-issue antibac to sluice off the staleness of being bedridden, the quick scrub made a world of difference. There weren't towels, so Lethe dried herself off with her uniform top. She wouldn't be able to wear it in public on an occupied world, anyway.

As she turned to redress in front of the long mirror, Lethe caught sight of the scar curving under her right breast. It was the same length and width as her thumb from tip to joint, still pink with newness. She remembered taking a wound on the _Endar Spire_, but didn't remember it being that serious. Carth must have treated it. The sudden visual of the handsome officer with his hands on her body wouldn't have been unwelcome in another situation: one where she wasn't laid out like a butchered meat slab. As it was, she hoped he didn't see a casualty every time he looked at her.

But the already healing wound was the only physical argument for weakness on her part. Her fair skin was otherwise unmarked by scar tissue, the contours of her body made up of lean, hard muscle complimented by the feminine curves of her breasts and hips. The well-developed calf and thigh muscles of her long legs implied proficiency in both speed and distance, as well as the ability to carry an equipment pack several klicks if needed. Her arms and back showed similar musculature: subtle, deadly. She had been a smuggler before she had been a soldier, which had influenced her training. Instead of training specifically heavy or light, she'd worked a cross-regimen suited to scouts and melee fighters who had to achieve a happy medium of strength and speed.

Lethe had cut her hair when she'd given up smuggling to be a soldier in the Republic, thinking a more boyish appearance would help her to blend in, free her from dealing with any fresh young recruits who'd never seen a female soldier before. It wasn't quite a buzz, but it was short. Sweeping cheekbones and full lips saved her from looking androgynous, blue eyes framed by thick lashes allowed her to think herself pretty. But she'd rather look as sexless as a permacrete detonator then weak, especially if it affected the job.

At the moment, _the job_ seemed to be assisting Carth in locating the last of their crew before finding a way to link up with the Republic.

Carth looked up from tinkering with his blaster when the door opened. His eyes went first to the outline of her bra, showing through her damp white undershirt, and then quickly snapped to her face. His ears were slightly pink. "Hey," he said. "You look- uh, I mean. Do you feel up to taking a look around?"

Lethe watched him rub the back of his neck, and thought, _See something you like, soldier? _"Good idea," was what she said out loud, because he could have been thinking of her scar, and not…well. "If we're going to be holed up here for a while we should probably know what our surroundings are." And then, because she meant it: "Thanks for saving my ass."

The tense lines of Carth's shoulders relaxed when she didn't react to his looking, and he stood with what Lethe could only think of as a rakish grin. "It'd be a shame to let it go to waste," he said, holstering his blaster pistols.

The easy familiarity to the quip and the harmless mischief crinkling the corners of Carth's warm eyes were…welcome, Lethe decided. She hardly knew him, but it was a mark of a good teammate to make someone feel like an old friend. She'd been on enough tight runs, had enough close calls, to appreciate the value of a ready joke, a dynamic that ignored awkward situations. She palmed the door lock, and didn't wait for him, only tossing over shoulder: "Watch it walk away, flyboy."

What she walked into was a mess. There was a shootout going down in the apartment hallway, and Lethe found herself reacting, diving to avoid blaster fire and coming up behind the nearest attacker with her vibrosword out. She plunged it into the exposed body-glove between the silver plate covering the man's shoulder and head. She planted her foot in his back and shoved as she withdrew her sword, and he toppled forward as blood sprayed from the kill wound. Carth, rushing out behind her at the sounds of battle, had dropped the others. All the dead were Sith.

"What just happened?" Lethe asked no one in particular. Surely they couldn't have been found this quickly?

"_You have saved us, human_!" the Duros who must have been the victim of the attack exclaimed. "_This isn't the first time the Sith have come here to trouble us, but hopefully it will be the last_."

"Er…you're welcome," Lethe replied in basic. "Glad I could help."

"The occupation is worse than I thought," Carth said. He looked at the bodies, his expression devoid of anything readable. "We should move these," he said.

The Duros shook his head, hoisting the nearest corpse under its arms. "_Leave that to me_," he said. "_My people have a place. They will assist me_."

Carth answered with a stiff nod, and started off down the hall. He ground his jaw as he walked, his steps precise to the point of seeming forced.

Jogging to catch up, Lethe asked, "Are you alright?"

"They only got what was coming to them," Carth said. His voice was tight with anger. "The Sith can't take a world without ruining it. They destroy everything they touch, like- like a plague. Pure evil. I'm surprised the population hasn't risen up already."

The depth of anger boiling under the surface of his words was surprising. Every member of the Republic, and many more people who weren't, thought of the Sith as the enemy, but with Carth it seemed…personal. "That's why we're fighting them," Lethe said. He continued to stalk down the corridor, not responding, so she tried: "And that's why we'll win."

"Well it'll be too late for-" Carth stopped abruptly, and Lethe nearly walked into his rigid back. He looked at her over his shoulder. "Look, we're going to be working together, so you should know I don't like the Sith."

Lethe pushed aside the sarcastic response that came to mind, and said: "I don't either." She raised her eyebrows expectantly, but didn't push for an explanation. It had to be personal, whatever it was, and she doubted Carth would like her any more for prying into his private affairs.

After a moment, he seemed to realize how ridiculous he'd sounded, and a small amount of the rigor setting his features receded. "I didn't mean to snap at you," he said. "It's just…I've had some run-ins with the Sith in the past. I don't really want to talk about them, though. Can we- can we just keep going?"

The last question sounded almost desperate, and Lethe dropped it.

Their level of the apartment complex wasn't terribly big, and after searching all of the abandoned rooms – and lending aid to the other hapless refugee-types where they could – neither of them were inclined to explore the other levels. Instead, they went back to their own apartment to take stock of their equipment and what they'd learned of their operating climate.

"It's obvious Bastila's pod must have crashed somewhere in the Undercity," Carth said as Lethe took inventory of their new gear and began re-organizing it in her pack. He had calmed down considerably as they had explored, and helping the locals had seemed to do most of the heavy lifting towards that end. "We'll have to find a way down there first thing."

"Bastila is a Jedi," Lethe said. She'd heard they could see the future and read minds, and there was no question as to their dueling skills. But she had also seen one taken out by an explosion aboard the _Spire_. Jedi died like the rest of them, in the end. She didn't want to think it of this Bastila person, though. A Jedi would be a great relief, given their skills, and it would alleviate some of the burden of finding a way off the planet. Speaking of which: "It's still possible she could show up at any time asking if we've found a way off the planet yet."

"Then I guess we have two priorities," Carth said, "finding Bastila and getting off of Taris. Even quarantined planets can usually be left, for the right price. Maybe we should see how many credits we have between us before we do anything else."

The count took much shorter than either of them would have liked.

"About enough to split a hot meal," Lethe said, then amended: "If we're not too picky." She was used to mess hall food, or what passed for it, and no smuggler was a stranger to the grey, gelatinous protein rations that had infinite shelf life and would withstand a planetary bombardment. She could make do on quality, and she was sure Carth could as well, but quantity was going to be an issue. They had enough problems without adding malnutrition to the list. On a sudden thought, Lethe gave Carth a suspicious look. "You said you didn't leave while I was out. Please tell me you weren't starving yourself."

He ran a hand through his hair, an auburn strand falling in his face at the movement, and chuckled. "I salvaged most of the rations from the escape pod. Don't worry about me."

Lethe decided not to call him on the lie. It was sweet, in a reckless, paranoid sort of way, that he really hadn't left her. "We'll have to restock, then. Here-" she handed over the credit chips "-you'd better do that." Carth looked like he was about to refuse, so she added: "I'll just spend them on cigarras and Toydarian whiskey if you let me carry them, and we should probably split up to cover more ground." She didn't want to do any such thing as split up. Between the Sith on the planet and Carth _on_ their planet, she wasn't sure who she should be more worried about starting a brawl. But it made the credits an easier sell, and she wanted to give him the opportunity to eat something, even if it was a ration bar. "I can start looking for a ship willing to smuggle hard merchandise."

"I guess I'll start looking into going down to the Undercity," Carth said, stowing the chips. "And I'll make sure I look for supplies while I'm at it."

Lethe smiled.

* * *

They parted ways outside the apartments, and Carth headed for the North side of the Upper City while Lethe accosted a nearby protocol droid for directions to the nearest Cantina. It was the likeliest spot to find a pilot with a ship, and even if there were none of those there was always work.

The door to the Uppercity Cantina was blocked by a human bouncer who made a face on seeing her that was probably intended to be menacing. "No entry," he said as Lethe approached.

"What do you mean no entry?" Her next best bet was to go around talking up the locals for odd jobs, and she didn't want to waste her time on work that wasn't a sure thing. "Is the Cantina closed?"

"It is to you," the bouncer said, tipping his head back to look down out at her over his long nose. He was half a hand shorter, and had to compensate. "This establishment is a favorite of the Sith officers. We can't have just anybody walking in off the streets."

When Lethe offered nothing in reply but a blank stare, he snapped: "Strict dress code!"

"Alright, I get the picture," she said, holding her hands up in a placating gesture and backing away. "Damn pretentious Sith," she grumbled to herself once out of earshot. She remembered passing a shop on her way and doubled back. She didn't have money, but some of the equipment she was carrying in her pack wouldn't be missed, and hopefully she could sell enough of it to buy something other than the pair of stale fatigue pants and white undershirt she was wearing.

The woman who owned the shop –Kebla Yurt's Equipment Emporium, as it was called – lit up at the sight of a customer and offered her a friendly greeting.

"I have a few items I'm looking to sell," Lethe said. "Do you purchase weapons?"

"Do I!" Kebla Yurt exclaimed. "Most of mine were confiscated. I'll take whatever you've got off your hands; there's always a buyer for something in short supply, if you know what I mean."

"I certainly do," Lethe said. She rested her forearms on the counter and leaned forward on them. Lowering her voice in a conspiratorial, just-us-girls, tone, she said: "I was hoping to do some buying myself, but apparently there's a dress code for the Cantina."

"Oh, honey, you know those men will do anything to get a woman into less clothes," Kebla said with a wink and a smile. "Let me show you what I got." She walked Lethe over to a supply rack, and began to show her all of the very latest in Tarisian fashion.

There were short dresses and long gowns, flight suits, flak vests, and a few things made with less fabric then the cloth Lethe used to shine her boots with. She briefly amused herself by imagining the look on Carth's face if she were to bunk down in their apartment wearing a shimmersilk…whatever the tiny piece of fabric was. Suppressing the snort of laughter the image provoked, she asked, "Can you show me anything made to be worn as armor?" She had a rough estimate in her mind of how much the mines, grenades, and extra weapons were worth, and knew that there was no way she could afford more than one outfit, even if she haggled aggressively. It would have to be something both elegant and functional.

"You want this," Kebla sad decisively. She pulled a hangar off the rack seemingly at random, but when she held it up Lethe could appreciate that the woman knew her business.

The material she recognized because she had smuggled it before: Jochelian oresilk, prized by political assassins because of its similarity in appearance to its namesake fabric. To the untrained eye, it might be used to create any of the luxurious robes worn by the very wealthy. If it would also turn any blade short of a lightsaber and take a blaster shot as well as Echani fiber armor, no one but the wearer needed to know.

"I haven't found a buyer in the two months I've had it. Jochelian made and not a sentient to buy it, can you believe a thing like that? Of course I have heard oresilk is about as unforgiving as Davik Kang's people."

The name-drop comparison made Lethe think Davik was someone everybody on the planet knew about; the tone and volume level it was said in told Lethe she should be aware of this person, too. "Who's Davik?" she asked, allowing Kebla to hand her the hanger and usher her into a changing compartment.

"A legitimate businessman, if you get my drift." Kebla's voice lowered to a whisper as she said through the door: "Smuggling, slavery, extortion. Two out of three is too many, you know what I'm saying? Anyhow. They say he's a member of the Exchange: the big intergalactic crime syndicate. Ever since the blockade, things have gotten worse for the poor folks here on Taris, what with Davik not having anywhere better to go. But you mark my words, a man that big isn't one for backwater worlds for long. But enough about him, let's see you!"

Lethe filed the information away for later reference, specifically noting the implication that this Davik might try to leave the planet, and the fact that he made his living through breaking laws. With a last look at her reflection, Lethe opened the door just wide enough to let Kebla give her a good once over.

The shop owner whistled. "Honey, if I let you outta my store in that number you'll have every pilot in the city begging to take you off world, blockade or no. You better not tell me you don't like it!"

The pushy-salesperson line made Lethe laugh. Jochelian oresilk _was_ unforgiving, and quite a few parsecs from the loose-fitting uniforms and flight suits she tended to favor. Although Lethe had been obliged to keep herself in peak physical condition for nearly her entire life, flaunting the body she worked hard to maintain came neither easily nor naturally to her. The short dress's sculpted bodice emphasized the curves of her breasts as well as the lines of her abdominal muscles, and the banded leggings showed the muscles in her calves and thighs. They disappeared under a precarious hemline, and Lethe was certain that if she were to bend over for any reason they would equally flatter her ass. The material itself was simultaneously as tough as permacrete and as soft as skin, almost fluid in the way it clung to and moved with her body. She didn't know or particularly care what dye had created the black-blue shade, but contrasted against her fair skin and platinum blonde hair, Lethe flattered herself with the notion that it likened her to the night skies over Deralia. Although in reality, she probably looked like a Firaxa shark in body paint. She said so.

Kebla hastened to reassure her. "You are your own toughest critic. If I had legs like yours and the credits to back them up you better believe I'd wear a number like that! And trust me, that is definitely your color."

Lethe affected to frown at the suggestive way tactical flexsteel straps stretched over her outer thighs to clamp to her boots, at the dull shine to the dark leggings that almost asked to be touched.

"Plus," Kebla added, "it's on sale."

Lethe suppressed her grin. "What's the damage then?"

Even on "sale" it cost her nearly everything but her vibrosword, but when Lethe approached the Cantina for the second time that day, the bouncer held the door open for her and turned all six shades of a Tatooine sunset. It was worth it.

Inside, the front room of the Cantina was minimalist and austere, boasting clean lines and little décor other than the glow tables filled with off-duty Sith playing pazaak. As a type, they looked bored and rich: a good combination for anyone with a knack for the game, but Lethe had never been any good at it.

"Let me guess," a voice from behind her said, "you want my autoprint."

Turning around, Lethe was surprised to see a Mandalorian in full armor leaning against the wall. His plated arms were folded over his broad chest, one booted ankle crossed over the other. His posture reeked confidence; she didn't need to see his face to figure out what he was looking at. "A little sure of yourself, aren't you, verd?" she asked.

"Am I? I haven't even asked yet. If you want to find out for yourself, I'll even let you buy me a drink."

Lethe didn't bother to suppress her snort of laughter. He really was sure of himself. "I'm not here for that," she said. "I'm looking for work."

"So I buy you a drink, is that it? Maybe after the match. Watching these pathetic amateurs trip all over themselves in the arena has a certain comedic value." He sat down in the nearest chair, which was angled towards a viewscreen. It was currently flashing advertisements for the arena in galactic basic. "You're welcome to have a seat," he said, sprawling in a way that clearly indicated where he wanted her to sit.

Lethe ignored the suggestion, asked: "What's this arena?"

"An Offworlder, is it? I might have guessed when you didn't recognize me immediately. The arena is where duelists go to test their mettle – and make their fortunes. There hasn't been a decent match since I retired, though. The Sith would pick an opportune moment to make death matches illegal. I guess even they don't want to cross someone as famous as I am."

His ego was almost palpable. The better to have it stroked, Lethe supposed. "How do I sign up for a duel?"

The Mando'ad threw his head back and laughed. The sight was…uncanny. Lethe frowned as something niggled at the back of her mind. Something…his head tossed back, the laughter. Irritated, now, she snapped: "You have an awful lot to laugh about for someone who traded his honor for a duelist's purse."

Lethe could practically hear him narrowing his eyes at her.

"If you somehow beat all the other duelists and want to fight a death match, come find Bendak Starkiller," he said.

She walked away. Well, he wouldn't be the first Mandalorian she'd killed. The thought drew Lethe up short in the doorway to the bar. Oh he wouldn't, would he? _I've never_…Lethe thought, but there was that strange thought rattling around the back of her head like a stray gizka, refusing to be caught.

If she was irritated before, she was livid when she finally found the Hutt in charge. "I want a duel," she said without preamble.

"Still want that death match?" she asked Bendak, five duels and fifteen hundred credits later. None of it had been enough to quiet the fury like dark smoke that was roiling through her. Lethe wanted Starkiller _dead_, and she had waited long enough.

From the sound of his voice, he was grinning inside his helmet as he responded: "Are you asking me to dance?"

The tone, the words, reminded her of _twin slashes on white armor, burning open metal and flesh and hot blood gushing, laughter, the blood on her thighs wasn't her own-_

Lethe blinked, and slowly realized she had Starkiller pinned to the wall by the throat. She was snarling. She stopped, and backed off. A small crowd had gathered, and they started to whisper. She thought she could hear the Hutt's booming laugh through the music, but it sounded like canon fire. The room started to swim.

"They're playing our song," she said. She could smell the sweet stink of charred flesh, distinct from any animal's meat, and it made her nauseous. The spinning room wasn't helping. Had Carth said something about smacking her head in the pod crash?

"Alright," Bendak said. "I've been watching you in the arena. You're just good enough to spark my interest, even if you are crazy. I'll agree to fight you in a death match."

For a single, mad moment, Lethe thought she could taste blood, could hear it pulsing in his veins. The whispers were louder, no longer concealed curiosity but open speculation, and Lethe ground out: "Time and place." She needed to be outside. She needed to be back in their apartment. She needed_-_

Lethe blinked again, and found herself at the bar, two Sith officers leaning unnecessarily close on either side of her. One was pawing at her, the other was trying to hand her a drink. Empty glasses were scattered across the bar top in front of her. Worse, Lethe felt an ache in her facial muscles and realized she was laughing. She stopped, and slapped the men away, ignoring their slurred protests. Lethe did _not_ want to know.

When she stalked into the other room, she found Ajuur the Hutt wriggling with excitement. "_I've heard the news, Mysterious Stranger_," the Hutt said, calling her by the dueling name he'd chosen for her. "_You and Bendak are planning a death match. This is excellent news…people are betting fortunes on this fight_!"

"It's not about the credits," Lethe snapped.

"Of course not!" the Hutt boomed, laughing. "I'm sure all the credits you'll receive if you win don't matter to you at all!"

Taking a deep breath, Lethe relaxed before she could start grinding her jaw. This was why she'd never worked for Hutts in smuggling. "I'm ready now," she said.

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, a guard appeared to usher her to the arena. Bendak was supposedly the best duelist Taris had ever seen. The very fact that he was still alive was a testament to his prowess. Lethe should have felt afraid. Instead, she felt a raging heat in her blood that was part fury, part something she didn't want to think about. It made her want to lash out with her fists and her feet, to physically tear the life out of the Mandalorian with her bare hands or her teeth, if she had to.

The announcer's scream for the match to begin was the screeching hiss of a vocal disrupter calling for an air strike; the two thermal detonators Bendak threw in rapid succession moved as slowly as the trooper who'd just gotten a face full of concussion grenade. Lethe simply plucked them out of the air, and arced them back towards their owner.

Bendak threw himself to the side at the last possible moment, slid, blaster out, firing. Lethe was already moving, feeling the heat of the fire scorching the air, and fired back. One shot glanced off his armor, another going wide as she ran at sharp angles, avoiding blasts herself. He was moving too, slowly, but she was herding him, and finally they closed, clashed, their swords locking and scraping at the hilts.

The Mandalorian had the advantage of height and muscle mass, of brute strength. He twisted his blade, catching hers, shoved her away and flicked his wrists in a motion that sent her sword flying. Lethe heard herself laughing as she closed with him again, unarmed. She went right of his savage thrust, her arm coming up around his throat, and she used the momentum to twist around him, land a vicious strike to his armor covered his kidneys that sent him staggering forward.

Behind him, she came at him again but he was ready for her. She had to leap to avoid the thrust, to fall to avoid the upswing, and when she landed she was holding the blaster he had holstered on his left hip.

He turned, and she aimed for the weaker armor that joined thigh and hip.

She didn't miss.

Bendak fell to his knees, then to his back. Lethe looked down at him, at the blood pumping from pierced armor, pierced arteries, and _he died laughing, surging_, _while a thousand thousand lives bore witness under burning stars; the bond, the break, the blood on her thighs wasn't her own…_

Lethe collapsed to wildly screaming applause.

* * *

When she woke up, she was laid out on an examining table, and Carth was looking down at her, his face etched with worry. "There you are," he said. "How do you feel?"

Her head felt like she'd gone on a spice bender. "Fantastic," Lethe said, and didn't even try to sit up. She hoped she hadn't been undressed, and chanced a look down, only to see that she was covered with a white sheet. She was probably naked, but would have to wait for her senses to fully return to be sure. At least she could see straight. "Where am I?"

"The Uppercity hospital," a kind, elderly voice said. "I'm Zelka Forne, and you had a nasty spell in the arena, from the sounds of it. You were brought to my hospital by my niece, Ms. Yurt, and I took the liberty of using your personal communicator to contact your friend here."

Forne came into Lethe's range of vision, and she supposed he did bear a slight resemblance to the woman from the shop, but she never would have made the connection. "I guess I owe you both," she said. "It's good to know there're decent people on this planet." How decent, they would know soon enough if the Doctor had gone through her personal communicator. If Forne was sympathetic to the Sith, they would be showing up at any moment.

"What happened?" Carth asked. His eyebrows were drawn together in concern. "The Doctor told me the examination showed no injuries."

The feeling was returning to Lethe's limbs, and suddenly she could detect the clinical scent of kolto. She'd probably been in a tank. Also, she was definitely naked. She wondered if Carth had been there for the show, and was about to make a crack about him at least owing her a drink, when the thought reminded her of Bendak's words, the swift, subtle fury that had followed. Her nausea spiked, and Lethe forced herself to swallow the rising bile. She had killed a man because he'd…he'd reminded her of…what?

_I am going mad_, Lethe thought and felt an icy shiver slithering down her spine. She held the sheet close to her body and carefully sat up. "I think I passed out," she said. She didn't really want to talk about it, to tell Carth that she had blacked out twice and killed a first-rate duelist- in less than five minutes, at that- for no reason whatsoever. But Carth was the only person she had, and space forbid if she did something to him...

"I had…I don't know." Trying to articulate it, Lethe found she had no idea what had happened, and the memory of it was already growing foggy. She tried anyway, hoping at least that some trust on her part might eventually be returned on Carth's. "A blackout. A…dream. I thought I remembered something, and then I was…_livid_."

A thoughtful "hmm" drew Lethe's attention to the doctor, who she'd forgotten was there. The continued absence of Sith authorities made her want to trust him, but… "You know I fought in a death match."

Carth put a hand on her bare shoulder. "He knows more than that," he said. "And don't worry; he's sympathetic to our position." Then: "You fought in a _death match?!" _

He grabbed her by both shoulders, shaking her as though to impart sense, and Lethe had to clutch the sheet to her chest to keep it from falling away.

"What were you _thinking_?" Carth demanded, and Lethe was about to retort that she was _thinking_ they were broke, and that it was better than the other offer she'd gotten from Bendak, and that if Carth could starve himself to watch her sleep, then by space she could fight in a death match to feed them, but Carth ranted right along without waiting for an answer, finishing, "I lost everything on Telos, and I am _not_ going to lose anyone else!"

"Uh," she said, feeling lost. Telos was a planet in the Republic. It had been bombed by the Sith, nearly destroying its surface. "For Telos!" was a cry she'd heard often enough in her brief tenure as a Republican soldier. Lethe wondered if Telos was Carth's home planet, if it had something to do with his bone-deep hatred of Sith. "Thank you?" she tried, not wanting to ask just yet.

Carth deflated, and let go, and Lethe readjusted her sheet. "So, Doc," she said, changing the subject, "Am I going crazy?"

Zelka Forne looked between her and Carth with something like fatherly amusement, and shook his head. "If you've taken any hits to the head recently, it probably rattled something. It sounds like you've got a bit of the amnesia, to me. You spent about an hour in one of my kolto tanks before your friend here showed up, though, so you should make a full recovery. I wouldn't worry too much about it if I were you; the human mind is marvelously resilient, can repair itself almost without limitation or help."

"That's, that's good news," Carth said, rubbing the back of his neck with a shy smile. "I'd hate for anything to happen."

Lethe thought she heard an implied _to you_ at the end of the sentence, and smiled back. "Thank you," she said, meaning it this time. "How much do we owe you, Doc?"

"Well, seeing as you'll need those winnings, given your situation, I do have a bit of a problem. Are you familiar with the Rakghoul disease?"

Lethe and Carth shook their heads.


	3. Taris: A Sure Thing

"Maybe if they didn't attack every breathing sentient on sight, they wouldn't have to buy the other gangs' loyalty!" Carth complained.

Lethe looked up from the medpac she was applying to his stomach, a wry grin on her full lips. "Well, we _are_ stealing all of their business by giving the locals the money to pay off their bounties. The Vulkar gang probably turns half its profit from bounties. It wouldn't surprise me if they arranged them, just to collect."

Carth hadn't even thought of that, but he supposed with scum like the Black Vulkar gang, there was nothing too low to stoop to. He considered the woman bent over the blaster wound he'd taken with a deeper level of respect. He had made her tell him about the arena after taking her back to their makeshift base from the hospital, and knew generally that she must be a decent fighter. But watching her in action was another thing altogether. He had come out after her too late to see what had happened in the hall, that first day outside their apartments, but here in the lower city it was like watching a windstorm. She had the best reflexes he'd ever seen in a non-pilot, and the way she fought, like she was moving through the steps of some exotic, brutal dance, was almost beautiful.

That Lethe was smart, too, shouldn't have been a surprise since her dossier said she had been a smuggler before joining the Republic as a soldier. Still, he wasn't used to coming across lovely, intelligent women who chose a soldier's life. He wondered what the catch was.

"You should be fine now," she said, and packed away the used kit in one of the pouches clipped to the tactical flexsteel running down her left leg.

He tore his eyes from her legs when she offered him a hand up, and used it to haul himself to his feet with a grunt. _Beautiful, good fighter, intelligent __**and**__ strong_, Carth thought. _There has to be a catch_.

"I'm glad we found this," Lethe said, helping him into the mod armor they had taken from their most recent attackers. "But next time you decide to get heroic on me, don't, ok?"

"Heroic!" Carth had to laugh at her accusing look. He had only been trying to draw the Vulkar fire off his crewmate, whose armor had held up even better than her assurances allowed for. Not that Carth had believed her story about armor that looked like body paint.

Whatever it was that she was wearing had made him uncomfortably aware of her. It reminded him of how vulnerable she had looked laid out on Dr. Forne's examining table. It had reminded him of the worry that had gnawed at him when for three days she had thrashed and screamed in her sleep, making him wonder if he was alone on this force-forsaken world. He hadn't felt so alone since Telos, and if Carth was honest with himself, it was the memory of having lost everything, everyone, once already that had frayed at his nerves since they'd crashed. The Sith occupation hadn't helped at all.

It also hadn't helped, having to ignore the way Lethe's armor hugged the curves of her body. Curves he couldn't help remembering, completely inappropriate as it was to do so. The fact that he was her superior officer as the _Spire_'s Commander, coupled with the fact that Lethe had been injured, made him feel guilty for looking.

"You can be plenty heroic, sister, so don't even go there," he said after what was probably an awkward silence. During which he had probably not been looking at her eyes. She didn't laugh, so he tried to cover by making light of the situation, asking: "It wasn't all bad, was it?" The blaster shot had only grazed his side, after all, not really pierced anything, though it had burned like a sonofabitch.

To Carth's surprise, she grinned wickedly and said: "No. With abs like that, maybe I'll find ways to patch you up more often."

The shock must've registered on Carth's face because Lethe snickered, and left him to pick his jaw up before going ahead into the Lowercity Cantina.

Carth caught up to her at the doors. Inside, it was dark, and loud, and smelled like spice, alcohol, and other vices he didn't want to know about. He took a step closer to Lethe and followed her through the crowd, keeping a wary eye on the other patrons.

Lethe was making a line for the bar, ostensibly to ask after the Hidden Beks that Carth had been advised to seek out when he'd acquired the Sith uniforms, but stopped to look in one of the other rooms with a curious expression on her face.

"What is it?" Carth asked.

"There's a Hutt in the Uppercity Cantina who runs the arena," she said. "I wonder what this one's racket is."

She went in, and Carth followed her.

"So," Lethe said when she reached the Hutt, "What's your racket?"

It laughed, a slimy tongue the size of Carth's torso coming out to lick what passed for lips on a Hutt. Carth suddenly wished Lethe were wearing full issue plate, since everyone knew Hutts were notorious in their preference for humanoid females. He took a step closer, just in case.

"_I am Zax. I run the bounty collection agency, of which you must have heard. Tell me, Offworlders, would you be interested in pursuing the bounty on Selven, Matrik, or Bendak Starkiller? I used to have two more, but Holden has told me that they have come up with enough credits to have the bounties removed_.**"**

Carth felt the brief warmth of satisfaction in his chest. It was good to know they were helping people, even if it were only a very few.

"Funny," Lethe said, "I already killed those people."

"_Ahhh, so you are the Mysterious Stranger we have been hearing so much about! Yes, now I do recognize you. You have killed Matrik and Selven, also? Well, that does not surprise me, a human of your talents_."

The Hutt then signaled to an attendant, who paid them in nine hundred-credit chips.

Carth whistled. "With that and what you made dueling, we might be able to convince this Davik character to take us with him when he leaves Taris, assuming he can. I don't know what Bastila will have to say about it, but first things first, right?"

Towards the front of the room, Lethe stopped again, this time to cock her head and watch a Twi'lek audition for a man who seemed less interested in her talent then her…assets.

Carth wasn't exactly surprised when she approached them. He had come to realize in their short association that Lethe could be exceedingly curious, almost to the point of being nosy. A common enough personality quirk in an ex-smuggler, he supposed, but he was surprised when Lethe joined the dancer by moving very close to her, face-to-face, and starting to dance.

_Well, that explains a lot_, Carth thought. _She's for the ladies. I should've figured._

Carth watched her sway her hips to the beat of the music, somehow managing to be perfectly in sync with the Twi'lek's suggestive movements, mirroring them to the picosecond, despite having just jumped in. Then the music changed, and the Twi'lek closed the distance, pressing her hips to Lethe's, and they swayed, locked, hips grinding. Lethe brushed the back of her hand down a long, green, lekku, then down the back of the shoulder it was draped over. The dancer trailed the pads of her fingers over the pale arch of Lethe's neck, and over the front of her bodice, not stopping until her hand rested on the blonde woman's slowly twisting hips.

Carth needed a very stiff drink. He turned around, only to take a step back when he found himself facing another Twi'lek, although this one didn't look old enough to be in such a dive.

"Wow," the kid said. "Your sister's a pretty good dancer. Think she'd give me some pointers?"

Caught off guard, Carth asked, "What makes you think she's my sister?"

The little blue Twi'lek raised her eyebrows and said, sarcastically, "Maybe because you're scaring off every male biped in the room with that frown? She could probably take care of herself, you know. How old are you two, anyway? Geez."

"How old- are you even old enough to be in here, missy?"

"I'm old enough to do anything I want if I've got big Z with me," she retorted, gesturing over her shoulder.

In the background, out at the bar, Carth could see a Wookie devouring three plates of food.

"I'm Mission Vao, by the way," she said, introducing herself. "And I guess I'm your official welcoming committee, since you're _obviously_ not from around here. Hi!"

The last was directed over his shoulder, and he looked to see Lethe walking back towards them, her cheeks flushed.

"Hi," Lethe said. "Mission? Did I hear right?"

"That's me! Like I was telling this guy, I'm the resident expert on the Under and Lower Cities around here, so I guess that makes me your official welcoming committee. Anything you want to know about Taris, look no further!"

Carth watched Lethe offer a friendly smile and introductions, wondering if he was coming off as overbearing. Maybe he'd been sticking closer to his crewmate than usual after she'd been in the hospital, but certainly not enough to give off the impression they were _related_. Their banter was enough proof of that, right? _Right, _Carth told himself. It wasn't hovering if she actually did need someone watching her back, which Lethe definitely did.

Carth focused back on the conversation, and realized they were talking about the Hidden Bek gang.

"I can totally show you where that is!" Mission said. "Gadon Bek's a pretty good guy; he's definitely someone to talk to if you're trying to find someone. He knows eeeeeverything." She drew out the last word, widening her eyes emphatically. "I'll get Zaalbar to help me draw you a map."

"Carth," Lethe said, placing a hand on his arm and drawing him back towards the bar as Mission went to join her Wookie friend, "I wanted to talk to you about something." At the bar, she leaned close enough for Carth to distinguish her scent from the myriad odors permeating the Cantina, and said in hushed tones, "I'm getting worried about Bastila. We haven't heard from her yet, and from the sound of things, those escape pods have been gone over by every gang on the planet, as well as the Sith patrols. What if they got to her first?"

Reigning in his attention, Carth frowned. He had been wondering the same thing himself. It was also a little strange that they hadn't been discovered yet themselves, given the thoroughness of the Sith patrols in the Uppercity. They'd kept a low profile, though, and if no one had seen him dragging Lethe from the escape pods then they should be okay for at least a little while longer, unless someone had sold them out. Or unless it was all some kind of trap…

"Ugh, would you back off at least like six inches?" Mission Vao was scowling at them, her blue face flushed violet. She handed them a map. "You should be able to figure out the Lowercity with that. Big Z helped me draw it. If you need anything else, I'll be around."

Feeling sheepish, Carth looked at the map, and told himself it wasn't to avoid looking at his companion. "To the Bek hideout?" he asked.

* * *

"Wait, wait, wait." Lethe held up her hand. "Mission thought we were _siblings?_ All humans look alike, is that it?"

They had just left the Bek base, having been told they needed to relocate Mission Vao in order to search an even less appealing part of an already unappealing planet, when Carth brought out this particular gem of information.

"Maybe," Carth said with noncommittal shrug.

Looking at him out of the corner of her eye, Lethe could tell there was something bothering him other than the notion of ogling his not-sister for the past two days. So she said, "You're too pretty to be my sister." When Carth didn't react to _that_, Lethe knew something was wrong. It was time to be nosy. "Carth," she said, coming to a stop, "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure." Turning back towards her, Carth broke into the smile Lethe had identified as rakish, mischievous, said: "I'm all ears, beautiful."

So he had been listening. "Are you trying to distract me?"

"What?" Carth put a hand over his heart, and took a staggering step back. The twinkle in his eyes gave the lie to his hurt act. "You can give me a compliment, but I can't give you one?"

"I never– oh." Lethe chuckled, remembering teasing him earlier about having enjoyed having her hands on his chiseled abdomen, even if it was just to keep him together. "That was just stating a fact," she said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

"Oh really?" Carth asked, cocking an eyebrow at her. "So what would an actual compliment sound like?"

Lethe thought about drawing the moment out by calling him something silly - a handsome thug, maybe - but his question sounded all too like a challenge, and she had never been one to actually mind the boundaries of a joke. Three long, purposeful steps brought her right into Carth's personal space, and Lethe just saw the surprise on his face before she pulled him by the collar into a kiss…

And jumped like a splashed cat at the sound of raised voices coming from the direction of the elevator. "Son of a -" Lethe grumbled, drawing her vibrosword as the voices escalated. So much for a good joke.

"Vulkars," Carth said behind her, in the same tone as her bit off curse. It had ended before he'd had a chance to turn the tables on her, but Lethe knew he'd get her back eventually.

They edged closer simultaneously, Carth in Lethe's peripheral vision with both pistols drawn. From the look of it, some of the Vulkar gang was trying to stiff Davik's collector on his share of their take. A feeling of foreboding crawled up Lethe's spine. With the distinct thought that there was no way this would end well, Lethe shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, just in case the fight spilled in her direction, but otherwise didn't draw attention to herself. When the collector whistled, Lethe braced herself for the reinforcements to appear, guns blazing, and for all of the seven hell moons of Korriban to break loose. Instead, a single Mandalorian approached, carrying a heavy blaster rifle the size of a swoop engine in one hand.

A faded tattoo curling around one of his thick biceps identified him as clan Ordo.

_She told her generals to break the clans. Stripped of arms, of armor, their war droids a reek of burning wreckage far, far down the beach, the Mando'ade were easy to identify, to separate. Even in the hour of exile, in the hour of execution, she would not permit them to remain shoulder-to-shoulder, comrades in arms. The army had been brought to its knees before her. She would have no less of its soldiers._

"Kaysh ash'amur chur ni," she whispered, and began to tremble as the echo – the memory? No – crashed through her. Pain hammered into her skull, left white-hot bores in her temples, and she tried to call for Carth, but the sound that came out of her throat was closer to a sob. He was there, holding her up, strong arm under her shoulders. His face swam in and out of focus, concerned, urgent; she thought he might have been yelling, but couldn't hear a word through the pain.

Lethe never saw the Mandolorian staring after her like a man who had seen his own ghost.

* * *

A/N: On the translation - it's as close as I could get without good info on conjugations to "He died beneath me." If it's wrong, or if something else is closer, I'd appreciate you letting me know. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it, and comments are welcome as always.


	4. Taris: Ghosts

**A/N:** I just wanted to take a moment to thank those of you who have left reviews: Brave November, WhosObsessed10, Charmedx Trance, Theano, Kotorqueen, et al who've been reading. Thanks for the support, and I hope you enjoy :)

* * *

In the apartment, Carth was holding a damp cloth to the pulse-point in Lethe's throat when her eyes finally fluttered open. He stifled his sigh of relief, not wanting to worry her. "There you are," he said.

The smile Lethe gave him looked frayed around the edges. "We've got to stop meeting like this."

Carth chuckled. "Did you have somewhere better in mind?"

She reached for the glass of water he was balancing on his knee with his free hand, and Carth set the cloth aside so that he could help her sit. He held the glass for her while she drank, and when she was done he set it aside. He wished the Doctor had had something more tangible to recommend for her than time. He didn't know or understand what triggered the spells she was having, but as a pilot he knew something of shell-shock and had seen several severe cases over his lifetime. He suspected the woman was suffering from something similar, even if it was buried under the amnesia Dr. Forne had diagnosed. He felt a dolt for not recognizing it sooner. He had certainly had his own share of traumatic experiences, some of them still raw, still painful.

"No," Lethe said. Her voice sounded uncharacteristically sad to Carth. Her face was slightly drawn, making her blue eyes seem too large. "Carth," she said, "I'm sorry."

He didn't understand what she could possibly be apologizing for at first, but then he realized she must be about to go into the regs on officer-crewman relationships. Maybe their banter had gotten out of hand– not that he was complaining– but he didn't need a long apology filled with legal babble to get over it. "It's alri -"_ght _he started to say, but she cut him off.

"It's not. This," she waved her hand, vaguely indicating herself, "must be just as hard on you, if not harder. You knew almost every crew member on the _Spire_, and the one you got stuck with is the one slowly going mad. It can't be bad enough that the ship and the rest of the crew were lost; you had to take care of me when you should have been able to focus on finding Bastila. I don't know what's happening to me. I'm sorry, Carth."

Completely blindsided, Carth could only stare stupidly for the first few seconds before snapping out of it. "No," he said, then, more emphatically, "_No_. I don't think that. And you're not going mad. You took a hard smack to the head when we crashed, and you lost a lot of blood before that from that piece of shrapnel that got lodged in your chest. Both of us are lucky to be alive, and you can't think I'd want to trade either one of our lives for someone else's on the _Spire_. Of course I wish there were more survivors, but that doesn't mean– no, hey, don't–"

Lethe swallowed, blinking rapidly, a few tears catching in her lashes and sticking. Carth gently wiped the tears still threatening to spill down her face away. "Don't cry, beautiful," he finished. "And don't be sorry. I'm not."

A deep breath, and then Lethe gave a sharp, business-like nod. "Maybe Bastila can help me, when we find her."

"I'm sure she can," Carth said, although privately he didn't like the idea of someone using the force to poke around her head. He had heard it could do terrible things to a mind, but the reverse had to be equally true. "And even if she can't, she'll probably want to make straight for Dantooine. That's where one of the Jedi enclaves is; we can rendezvous with the fleet from there after– well, when we feel up to it."

Another silent nod, as though Lethe was digesting the information. She still looked exhausted, Carth thought, but the little smile she gave him reached her eyes.

"Thanks, flyboy. You always seem to be saving me."

* * *

"No, I'm not complaining," Carth said, "I just wish there were another option."

Privately, Lethe agreed with him. If there was any feasible way she could have stayed safely out of Carth's way in the apartment while he searched the Undercity, Lethe would have. The last thing she needed was another one of her little episodes, especially when there was the possibility that she could endanger Carth. But going along with his plan to search alone was even more certain to end with him hurt, or worse. They had argued about it, and it wasn't until Lethe pulled a dirty trump card – who was going to be there for her if he died? – that Carth finally acquiesced.

"Look," Lethe said, rechecking her spare blaster, "I promised I'd stay back and follow your lead on this one, and I'll try to avoid hand-to-hand if possible. Besides, it's only until we find Bastila." She palmed the door control, and the elevator opened onto the Undercity.

She had heard enough about the over-literal caste system on Taris to have prepared herself mentally for the sight of the wretched hovels dotting the landscape, the sun-starved people milling aimlessly like ghosts. The only light was artificial, and weak, and barely enough to see clearly, let alone enough for a human body's needs.

Lethe hadn't been prepared for the smell. Dimly, she could see the shapes of permacrete structures that must house the sewer pipes that would travel up and into the Lowercity, allowing waste to be deposited somewhere no one would have to think about it. No one but the people living on the planet's true surface, anyway. Lethe wondered if, living with the overwhelming stench their entire lives, the people of Taris' Undercity could even detect it.

She watched as two of them, armed with sticks, slunk forward out of a shadow created by one of the hovels, approaching her and Carth with a kind of wary hunger.

"Upworlders!" the taller one said. "It costs five credits to use our elevator!"

Lethe was able to make out the tiny details of his person, even in the non-light of the Undercity. His eyes were too bright in his face, his skin damp, clammy, despite the lack of enough heat to warm a body, let alone draw out a sweat. His clothes, likely third or even fifth hand, were filthy, torn, hanging off of him in angles that told Lethe he was malnourished as well as sick. She wondered where in this abysmal place he would be able to trade credits for anything of use to him.

"This has to be some kind of joke," she heard Carth say; "Even the beggars are trying to rob us!"

"We aren't carrying any credits," Lethe told the beggar honestly. They had removed the water head from the wall of their 'fresher and hidden the credits in the pipe, then set mines on the 'fresher and apartment doors. "But here. We have rations and medicine. Take what you need." She unslung her pack from her shoulders, and opened the compartment where they had stowed enough supplies to carry them through a two-day search of the Undercity.

The men stepped forward, watching her suspiciously, as they each took what they could carry in their off hands. They ran away quickly, laughing to each other: "Food and medicine! Enough for weeks!"

With a sad shake of her head, Lethe closed her pack and returned it to her shoulders. "I think we should look for Dr. Forne's Rakghoul serum while we're down here," she said. "It couldn't hurt, as long as we're looking for Mission." She looked at Carth, hoping he wouldn't insist on heading straight into the sewers. She knew the problems with Taris were bigger than a disease, but she felt that being in a position to help somehow obligated her to. To her surprise, Carth was looking at her with something like admiration.

"That was really good of you," he said. "I thought they just wanted credits for alcohol and spice. How did you know?"

"You can't buy spice for only five credits." Not anywhere, not even if it was cut with something else. "Not enough for everything they're dealing with, at least. Come on. Let's start searching."

They were able to follow the directions of a helpful young woman to the compound's gates, where they arrived in the middle of an argument. It looked like the man was keeping the young lady from opening the gate they needed to use.

"We need to go through this gate," Lethe interrupted.

"It's too dangerous!" the man snapped, a scowl that looked a lot like terror on his face.

The young lady – the girl, Lethe decided, noting the smooth, flawless if greyish skin around her eyes and mouth – let out a sob. "Please," the girl said, "it'll catch him if he doesn't open the gate."

Looking through the metal grate of the barrier, Lethe could see someone running at break neck speed towards them, his long legs eating up the distance between him and the gate. Behind him, closing, was a Rakghoul. It was appalling, with chalk-white flesh twisted and soft around a once-human body, bulbous tissue and tufts of wiry hair obscuring any recognizable features. She could see an open, slavering mouth, and eyes mad with rending, tearing bloodlust.

"Get out of my way," Lethe said. Her voice sounded cold even to her ears, and thankfully the man moved before she would've been obliged to move him.

Carth opened the gate for her, and positioned himself outside at an angle to give her covering fire without flagging the runner. Lethe pulled the pin out of a flash grenade, and risked a few of the runner's precious seconds to cook it before throwing.

It went off in the air to the right of the pursuit, and the Rakghoul turned its attention towards the distraction, the runner momentarily forgotten. Carth fired both pistols. It took five blasts for the creature to stop moving.

"Nice shooting," Lethe said, meaning it.

"Thanks." Carth shot a look in the direction of the tearful reunion inside the compound. "Let's leave before they try to reward us."

They moved out again, this time in the direction of the crashed pods. There were bodies: one Republic, a few Rakghoul, more Sith. Lethe rifled through the Sith patrol's pockets, her face turned away over her shoulder so she wouldn't have to look at the decayed, corrupted flesh. Her hand finally closed on a cool, hard vial and she straightened, holding the serum triumphantly.

"Don't…don't move! I'm…I'm not afraid to use this blaster if I have to!"

Carth muttered something that sounded like a curse, and Lethe turned, slipping the serum into one of her pouches, to see what else the force-forsaken planet had decided to throw at them.

It was a mercenary, carrying a blaster rifle, wearing only minimal armor. _Good, an idiot_, Lethe thought. She'd take stupid trouble over the intelligent kind all day, all year. She was about to tell him to get himself back inside the compound, when two more mercenaries came around the corner of the nearest sewage plant behind him.

"Settle down, kid," one of them said. "The last thing we need is more casualties from a needless firefight."

The one who'd spoken was the one in charge of the little group of mercs; every line of his bearing said _leader_, and it didn't take a genius to know it. His accent was Mandalorian, apparent to a trained polyglot from the harsh consonants. A big man, tall, he had broad, powerful shoulders and arms thick with muscle. His eyes were as grey and hard as durasteel and his jaw could've chiseled granite. The shock of dark hair on his head was cut with military precision, and peppered with enough grey that Lethe decided he had to be a veteran of the wars. Of all of them, probably. He was also unnervingly familiar, but once Lethe saw the clan tattoo she placed him.

"Ordo." From yesterday, outside the Lowercity elevators. The fact that he didn't seem surprised she remembered him told Lethe that Ordo remembered her, too.

"Canderous. And this is no place for tourists, though from the look of you, you're here for the same thing we are."

There was something else about him, though: something…something like a hard voice suddenly silenced. Frowning, Lethe asked: "What are we here for, then?"

Canderous Ordo gestured with his heavy repeating blaster rifle towards the crashed pods. "Salvage. Let me give you some friendly advice: forget about it. Everything worth finding went to the Vulkar gang or the Sith patrols." He curled his lip at the bodies Lethe had been searching moments before. "Make that just the Vulkars."

There was something very suspicious to Lethe about a Mandalorian offering a stranger a friendly anything. "If you know there's nothing worth finding, then why are you down here looking?"

His grin was brief and feral, showing the flash of white teeth in something too amused to be a snarl. Barely. "Maybe I enjoy the hunt."

_One had the audacity to question what he termed her mercy, spitting that he wanted none of it. Another took it up, a curse that became a roar: no mercy. Her Jedi took their heads; pale blades flashed down on unbent necks, cleaner executions than what she'd meted out herself. Even her second wanted to know why. Why, when so many were already dead, their bones pulverized to the white sand of this sanguine beach. That screeching voice, harsh and mechanical even in her own ears as she answered: "Life isn't mercy. Maybe I enjoy the hunt."_

Lethe blinked hot wetness from her eyes, and looked down at the Rakghoul embedded on her sword. She had impaled it at the base of its neck. Around her, the mercenaries were forming into a lopsided V, the bodies of some eight monsters dead. Three looked to have been eviscerated. Feeling eyes on her, Lethe tore her gaze away and swung it around. Canderous didn't bat an eyelash, but continued staring thoughtfully, his grey eyes locked with hers without apology.

"Hey, are you–? Ah, shit, here–" Carth, popping the cap on what was probably an antidote.

There was a hard, metallic pinch as Lethe felt the shot in her neck.

Maybe Canderous sensed the question Lethe hadn't formed yet, because he said: "The Undercity isn't a good place to stand around chatting. I've already lost half a dozen men. You should leave, too." Then he was leaving, his mercenaries moving out at his hand signal, his deep voice carrying back without needing to be raised.

"Are you okay?" Carth asked.

"I'm not sure." Lethe tore her gaze from the Mandalorian's back, scrubbed a hand over her face. It came away bloody, but she doubted the blood was hers. And she was still standing, the only dead Rakghouls. It was enough, she decided. "But we have the serum. I suppose now we just need to find Mi-"

The words hadn't even finished leaving her mouth when the girl in question appeared from around the same corner, running, out of breath. She saw them, and slowed to a stop, panting, "Please, help me. No one else…will, help me. They _took _him!"


	5. Taris: For Any Reason

**A/N:** The translation: cyar'ika is the Mandalorian word for "sweetheart." The chapter has been rewritten about five times, and this final version is loosely inspired by End of Watch. Kudos if you figure it out. Also, I promise we're getting off Taris next time. Thanks to **Who'sObsessed10** for pointing out a couple rough spots, which I've fixed. I'm my own beta, so it happens every now and then. I hope y'all enjoy, and as always I adore all your comments.

* * *

"Hold your engines just one second. You're telling me that you saved my friend, cleaned out the Vulkar base, stole a high-tech swoop mod, and are racing in the opener for Gadon, all to rescue a _Jedi?"_

"Well, she's taking it better than I thought," Carth said under his breath.

Mission glared at him, putting her fist on a cocked hip and shaking her blaster rifle as though it were an angry finger, and Carth a saucy child. "And just what's that supposed to mean, huh? Big Z swore a life debt to your friend; did you think I'd go running for the Sith or something? I already figured out you two came out of the escape pods, you know. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where a pair of do-gooder Offworlders came from during a quarantine. I just want to know why a Jedi needs so much rescuing in the first place!"

Unsurprisingly, Mission's belligerent tone made Carth bristle. "I didn't say anything about informing on us to the Sith, Mission, but if that's the first thing that came into your head, then maybe it's not too far off!"

"Enough," Lethe said, effectively cutting off both whatever comeback Mission was about to throw and Carth's rising irritation. Her night had been bad, her day worse, and the scant hours between the time the three of them had returned to Gadon with his swoop accelerator, reeking of sewage and what was left of the Vulkar guards, and the time the race was scheduled to start were barely enough to wash and eat, let alone plan or rest. Lethe had insisted they prioritize, saying none of them would be good for anything if they were sick or starving. So they had taken advantage of Gadon's hospitality, and now, in the private dorm allotted to them, Lethe had decided it was time to fill Mission in on what the young Twi'lek was getting herself into by throwing in her lot with them. It had, as Carth had said, gone better than she'd expected.

More than that, it had allowed Lethe to gauge Mission's reaction to a perceived insult, and helped her decide how to broach the subject of the swoop race. She had a feeling that getting Bastila back to their apartment wouldn't be an easy feat, even if everything went smoothly on the gangs' end. She was more worried about Brejik, but they would still need to get Bastila past the Sith guard at the elevators, and through the Uppercity plazas to their makeshift base, where Zaalbar was keeping an eye on things.

"We've been wondering the same thing about Bastila, Mission," she said. "Gadon said they have her in a neural inhibitor, which means she can't use the force; she's basically helpless. But that doesn't answer the question of how she was captured in the first place. It's possible that Bastila was injured when her pod crashed, which would make it even harder for us to get her from the Lowercity to our apartment undetected. One of us is going to have to make sure the Sith guards are nowhere near their elevators, and that the plazas are clear so that we can move her, on a stretcher if need be. This is going to be the hard part. If anyone in the upper City sees Bastilla, it's game over."

"I can do that!" Mission exclaimed. "Distraction is like my middle name! I can come up with something to get everyone off the street, and big Z can keep a lookout."

"Is that safe?" Carth asked, playing along.

"No." Lethe said. She made her voice hard, unyielding, wanting to impress on Mission how dangerous things were bound to get. If not now, they almost certainly would once they contacted Davik to be smuggled off the planet. "Mission, I know you can do this, but I have to tell you how important it is that the Sith do not see you while you're working. If they do, they'll either take you for questioning or shoot on sight, and you'd be better off with the latter. I'd ask Carth, but he's the only one Bastila knows so he needs to be there when we get her, in case she's lucid."

To Lethe's relief, Mission paled slightly. She didn't like scaring her, but she needed Mission to be elsewhere if things got ugly and Lethe already knew after watching her bait the rancor in the sewers how invisible she could be when needed. Mission would be safe, especially with her big Wookie friend to guard her back. She and Carth, on the other hand, would almost certainly have a fight on their hands when they tried to claim Bastila from Brejik.

"Don't worry," Mission finally said with conviction that was only half false, "No one can stop this Mission!"

* * *

As it turned out, Lethe's feeling had been right: it was much easier to get Bastila to the apartment then it had been to get her from Brejik. And as much as the woman's condescending attitude put Lethe's, and Carth's, teeth on edge, she supposed the younger woman was still rattled after her harrowing experiences as Brejik's slave.

So when Bastila asked if Lethe was alright, it only took a moment for her to decide to forgive the woman's attitude and follow through with her originally planned course of action. She needed help, after all, and the sooner the better.

"I've been having episodes, of a kind," Lethe said. "Visions, maybe? I'm not sure. I had one when I first saw you; it…distracted me, while I was fighting Brejik."

"A vision, you say? Of what?"

That point was even less clear; Lethe had seen Bastila fighting, had seen a red saber clashing with a pale gold one, the flutter of a black cape, the flash of a red mask. She described this, and when she'd finished Bastila seemed disturbed, although not surprised.

"You saw my fight with Revan. Tell me; was this your only vision?"

"No; there have been several others." Lethe looked up at Carth from where she was leaning against the workbench, wondering if she should disclose the other incidents over the past several days. From the suspicious scowl he was giving Bastila, Lethe decided to wait.

Standing at a shallow angle to the direct line between Lethe and Bastila, Carth only had to shift his feet to plant himself between them. He folded his arms. "Why would she be seeing things from your past? Are you doing this to her?"

"Hardly." Bastila's voice sounded peevish. "The most likely explanation is that Lethe is sensitive to the force. Force sensitivity can manifest in strange ways when someone who is gifted in it never receives proper training."

"Woah." Mission's wide-eyed interjection summed up the situation admirably.

Lethe pushed herself off the workbench and went to Carth. She touched his shoulder and felt him relax marginally, acknowledging her, but he didn't move. _Paranoid_, Lethe thought, fondly. "Can you help me?" she asked Bastila. If not, she would just continue to grit her teeth until they were able to get off Taris and to Dantooine, since Bastila seemed determined to go there as well.

"Perhaps. I will need to meditate for some time before my capabilities are sufficiently strengthened for the endeavor, however. I wouldn't care to damage you by applying myself to your mind without first resting. Did you say you had a plan to leave Taris?"

"Yes," Carth said tightly.

The idea of getting involved with the exchange probably wouldn't sit well with Bastila, and that was assuming Canderous wanted to discuss the same things they did. Lethe had been the only one to speak the Twi'lek messenger's language, but she'd pulled Carth aside to explain the requested meeting as Bastila was walking into the apartment; Mission's genuine shock and awe at meeting a real Jedi had distracted Bastila long enough for the conversation to take place. But there was still the problem of the "visions," and they seemed to occur most frequently when Lethe ran into Mandalorians.

"Suppose I have one of these visions while we're meeting our contact?"

The idea seemed to catch Bastila off guard, but then she slowly nodded as if considering the potential ramifications of such a scenario. She looked down at her open palms for a moment, lying face up on her knees in a classic meditation pose. The cool Jedi serenity quickly settled back over her face, and she looked up again. "Normally I would never suggest this, but…substances containing the compound ethanol have been known to suppress force capabilities. If I weren't still at large, I would go myself to spare you having to go through such an ordeal."

"You're saying I should get _drunk_?"

"Boy, what an ordeal," Mission said sarcastically.

"Yes, well, in these types of meetings it is never wise for one person to go alone, and I understand this planet is heavily biased in favor of humans. You will simply have to go with Carth. Perhaps Mission can accompany you, and notify me if anything goes amiss."

* * *

They found Canderous waiting for them just inside. There was an almost predatory humor that radiated off of him, and his eyes slid off the others who had entered ahead of Lethe – Carth, Mission – dismissively. They locked onto her like magnets, but before he could speak Lethe held up a forestalling hand.

"Drinks first, talk later."

He acquiesced with a shrug and a gesture towards a private table, and didn't comment when Lethe ordered and downed four shots of Tarisian bourbon before speaking. Mission watched it all with typical wide-eyed enthusiasm, her mouth shut so hard she might be putting craze lines in her teeth.

"Alright. You wanted to talk?" Lethe made it a question, though it wasn't.

Canderous put his forearms on the table they'd all settled in, leaning forward and speaking in soft basic, the volume at odds with the gravelly tone to his voice. "I saw you in action at the swoop race; very impressive, aside from how you handled yourself in the Undercity. You know who I am, and who I work for. What you don't know is that Davik has a ship primed and ready to break through the Sith blockade. I plan to be on it, without him. That's where you come in. In order to get the launch codes to break through the quarantine, I need someone smart, and ruthless, someone I can count on to get the job done, to break into the Sith base and steal those launch codes."

Lethe felt Carth lean closer, his knee brushing against hers in a way that added to the warmth of alcohol in her chest.

"Careful." His breath was equally warm against her ear. "Mercs like this haven't a lick of conscience…they'll betray you in a heartbeat. This could be a trap."

Canderous leaned back in his chair. His frown was all irritation, but he addressed her, not Carth. "I'm talking to you, not your joy boy, aren't I?"

The alcohol burned and stuck in all the wrong places as Lethe swallowed her surprised laugh around it. Joy boy, was it? Instead of denying it, Lethe slung an arm around Carth's neck, said: "I told you you're pretty," and bit at the air inches from his ear.

Carth knocked back his double without comment.

Mission made a sound like gagging.

The Mandalorian raised one dark eyebrow, his expression deadpan. "I don't need to know. Do you want to get off this rock or not?"

As a veteran of the Madalorian wars, Carth probably had good reasons for not wanting to trust Canderous. Lethe didn't think this was a trap, but it never hurt to be sure. "One condition: You follow me into that base."

"Everyone knows who I work for." Canderous made a cutting, negative, motion with his hand. "That's why I need you: to collect Davik's droid from Janice Nall and hack into the base. If I broke into the Sith base, they'd send an army down on Davik's estate to get those codes back."

But that was assuming they'd leave survivors, which was a big assumption, given Carth's general hatred and paranoia of all things Sith. Lethe had a feeling Canderous wanted to be sold on the idea, and baited her smile with the promise of danger. She almost felt blood red synth-wool clutched in her fists, but was thankfully just drunk enough to ignore it. "Follow me into that base, cyar'ika. You know it's the best fight you've had since" _a world like a black hole, the bones of thousands ground to white sand beneath the beaten's knees_ "then," Lethe finished abruptly, using a word that could be a vague reference to anything at all instead of the tangle of images the force had flooded her with. Wasn't the alcohol supposed to suppress this sort of thing?

Canderous had noticed her pause. Interestingly, he actually seemed to be considering it, now. The feeling was right. Certain it would be the final push, Lethe let Carth go to lean forward on the table. "Follow me."

There was a scar she'd never noticed bisecting Canderous' left eye. The liquor added a warm haze to it all, enough to make her consider dragging the tip of a fingernail over the war-badge, not enough that she didn't recognize her buzzed haze for what it was.

Canderous nodded, slowly, once. "Call me when you have the droid."

* * *

Over Mission's not unexpected protests, Lethe sent her to relay the plan to Bastila while she commed Canderous and Carth retrofitted the droid as well as possible without the equipment they'd left in the apartment.

"I don't like him," Carth muttered. The T3-M9 astromech droid made a whistling sound, and he added: "Neither does Tee-three."

"We don't need to like him. Besides, if he's with us he can't set us up, and if he tries he's going down too." There was probably a flaw in that logic somewhere, but it still seemed the most reasonable course of action.

"It's not that, I mean it is, it's just– the way he _looks_."

"Uh-huh," Lethe said, loading the double syllable with her lack of understanding.

"I mean if you weren't–" Carth gestured vaguely at her, squinting at something behind one of Tee-three's panels "–then I wouldn't put it past him!"

"Okay, what?"

"Well you're…I mean you wouldn't…I just don't like the way he looks at you, even if you aren't interested in men!"

Her sudden, loud laughter made Carth jump, and whatever he'd been fiddling with sent a splot of grease into his face. Lethe laughed even harder, until she was almost crying. "I'm sorry," she gasped, and after another fit of giggles at his insulted look managed: "I'm not–" and she mimicked his vague hand gesture.

"Oh." An almost boyish look of sheepishness pinked Carth's ears and he rubbed at the grease with the back of his hand, succeeding only in smudging it.

The opportunity to mess with him was too good to pass up. "Although, come to think of it, Bastila does have pretty nice ti-"

"_Canderous here_."

"We have the droid," Lethe said into her comlink, and heard Carth laugh.

"_Meet me at the base_. _Out_."


	6. Taris-Space: Truth is a Lie

**A/N: **Canderous' POV! Which requires some translations:

_Shablaa_: crazy

_dar'Jetii_: dark jedi

_besk'ar_: Mandalorian iron

_naysh_: no

_gar_: you

_ash'amur_: dead, died

_hu'tuun_: coward

Also, assume the last time jump/ segment takes place over the course of about a week. Now for the **warnings**: I still don't understand how to rate something based on age. Appropriate for sixteen year olds? I'm pretty sure all I watched when I was sixteen were Saw and Hostel and I only wrote bad, slashy elf torture. I don't think this is as bad as all that, but I always thought Revan and Malak would've been a little _Fifty Shades_ and that mess has to resurface sometime. If you're still with me, then, onward…

* * *

The bulge in the Sith corpse's throat was probably the heart, ripped from the thoracic cavity and not having made it out through the mouth. 'Lethe Dashao' didn't seem to realize what she was doing.

When Canderous had met her and her pilot joy boy at the Uppercity Cantina, he had insinuated it was her performance in the swoop race and ensuing brawl that attracted his interest in working with her. He hadn't told her that he had been watching her before that. Lethe didn't need to know, yet, that Canderous had borne witness to her death match against Bendak Starkiller. He had admired the skill, the ease, the controlled movement and perfect form with which she fought. He hadn't seen such dueling himself since the wars, although the match was over too quickly for that to be a fair assessment, and he had been too far away to make out her features.

It was her words, that rich, feminine voice speaking his language that had drawn his attention in the Lowercity. That close, there had been no mistaking her. So Canderous had tracked her to the Undercity, where she had seen right through his explanation as to what he was doing there. But his calculated response had triggered a reaction that didn't fit at all.

Canderous had been planning to steal Davik's ship for a long time, but asking her to steal the launch codes was a convenient excuse to spend more time watching her. Canderous was a practical man, enough to know there was something much larger going on than his own personal quest for answers.

The woman who had once wept over the corpse of her foe had gone straight through several of the base's soldiers, cleaving them open from groin to hairline, and had obviously been using the force in this last fight with the dar'Jetii apprentice. Her fury on seeing the Sith had been palpable. Was still palpable, even though he was long dead.

Whatever was going on, one thing was obvious: Carth had no idea what he was dealing with. The pilot was talking to another female on his comlink, gesturing wildly with his blaster pistol while Lethe raved and hacked at the dead Sith, screaming about someone called Ulgo.

"Shablaa dar'Jetii," Canderous muttered, and Lethe snapped out of it, jerking as if in response to his voice.

She looked down at the body and backed away, her grip on her vibrosword tightening until her knuckles turned white. She tossed her head like a spooked animal, flicking pale, sweat-damp hair out of her eyes. Then, her hair had been much longer, bright as molten besk'ar flowing around her dark robes. She didn't seem to notice the stolen lightsaber in her offhand, still deactivated since she'd ripped it out of the Sith's grip with the force. "Carth?"

"Shit. Just get here, would you? Hey, hey beautiful, it's okay, I'm right here."

It was too bad that Lethe didn't kill the pilot the same way she had the Sith, but life wasn't perfect. Canderous let them have their little moment and went to check on the droid they'd left at the front.

When he got there, the T3-M9 swiveled its domed head towards him and whistled an alert. He went to look at the computer, and T3 brought up a visual display of the outside security cams. The Jetii Bastila was approaching, and Canderous figured that was who Carth had been calling.

"Let her in," he told the droid.

The doors slid open, and she walked through them without breaking stride. "You're the contact?"

"Obviously. Your friends are–" a glance at the security display T3 was cycling through "–on their way out."

The sound of footsteps along the corridors preceded their reappearance. Carth looked more shaken than Lethe did, but it was at her that the Jetii directed her concern.

"Are you quite alright, Lethe? Did you see anything?"

"This isn't a good place to talk about it, Bastila. It won't take very long for the Sith in orbit to figure out something's wrong when they stop receiving regular reports from this base." A strange, confused look settled on her face after the pronouncement.

"We can go to Davik's estate now," Canderous said, watching Bastila in his peripheral vision. She was watching Lethe, who was pinching the bridge of her nose.

"I'll go with you," Carth said.

"Not you, Fleet. No one with his head on straight would think you're anything but Republic."

Carth stared at him, and then he took an agressive step forward, his right hand twitching towards his holstered blaster. "Where did you learn that call sign?"

Canderous chuckled. "I ran the lot of you through an Exchange background check." He had had to sell Davik on the idea Lethe was a potential hire to get her into the Estate, and needed to know if any of her companions would run afoul of the system. Carth Onasi was a bright red flag, and wouldn't get within a klick of the Estate without getting picked up for sale to the highest bidder. He had a reputation, but some of Davik's people – Calo Nord, for one – might just be up to it.

'Lethe Dashao' hadn't turned up anything, and neither had an image search of her headshot. Someone had done a very thorough job of erasing her existence.

"Someone want to tell me what's going on, here? Carth?"

With a glare that Canderous only responded to by baring his teeth, Carth turned back to Lethe. "Fleet was my call sign in the Mandalorian wars. He–" here the pilot stabbed a finger in Canderous' direction "–has been investigating us."

"Enough," Bastila said. "I will go with them to meet this Davik. I can pass as Lethe's swoop prize easily enough, as long as the Exchange is no friend to the Vulkars or Sith."

Her, Davik may recognize. Taris was a backwater pit of a world, but news did reach it, from time to time. The Jetii who was supposed to have killed Revan made quite a stir when she'd turned up as Brejik's slave, but Davik wouldn't care who she was. It was a surprisingly sensible suggestion for someone who looked like she carried her lightsaber shoved up her ass. "Let's go then. Wipe the security tapes, Republic."

* * *

It was too early to put the heist in motion when they arrived at Davik's estate. After flooding Lethe with force energy that had tingled unpleasantly, Bastila had said she needed to rest after the attempt at settling her mind, so Lethe decided to have a look around. Davik had _requested_ that she remain in the guest wing when unaccompanied by his people, and she had half a mind to scope out the spa.

It wasn't to be. Canderous was waiting directly outside her room, leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his broad chest. His eyes were narrowed, his mouth set in a hard, firm line.

Somehow, Lethe had expected this even if she'd hoped to avoid it. She offered him a disingenuous grin, asked: "Your room or mine?"

Canderous snorted, unfolding himself from the wall. "Mine."

He probably knew that hers was bugged. Lethe followed him down a complicated set of hallways, past two security checkpoints that she wasn't looking forward to taking out, and finally to a private suite. If Carth were there, he'd have something to say about the Mandalorian getting her lost on purpose. Probably something about following strangers into their bedrooms, too.

The room was enormous. More like the size of a flat, it was a testament to how high up in Davik's employ Canderous was. The fact that it contained none of the decadence, the vice, that Lethe associated with crime lords and their people – spice, stim units, holo-suites, slaves – was a testament to what Canderous thought of his position in the Exchange. An old-school Mando'ad, then: still following the code of honor that had been abandoned by so many of his people after the wars.

Behind her, his back to the closed doors of the room, Canderous said: "Your friends seem to think there's something wrong with you. You want to tell me what's going on?"

Lethe sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. He deserved to know, if he was going to agree to take them to Dantooine, and especially if she took it into her head to try killing another Mandalorian. That didn't make admitting the weakness any easier, especially to someone whose whole life was likely built around battle-prowess, but she didn't try to couch or sugar-coat it: "I've been having blackouts accompanied by memories that aren't mine. A local doctor diagnosed me with amnesia. Bastila has told me it's all due to latent force sensitivity."

"Amnesia." From the sound of his voice, the slow, skeptical drawl, Canderous didn't believe that one any more than she did.

Lethe turned.

Canderous was regarding her with confused intensity, his dark eyebrows drawn and raised towards his hairline. "You don't remember being–"

A name like a hammer blow, and the world fell in around her.

Canderous sprang into action as Lethe's knees buckled, and caught her before she fell. The second his hands were on her every muscle in the woman's body seized and she convulsed, her eyes rolling towards the back of her head. Just when Canderous thought she was going to pass out, her face tightened, and she let out a single, long, keening scream until her lungs were emptied.

Lethe's eyes came back cloudy with moisture, unfocused. "Mand'alor?" She clutched his shirt, her hand fisting weakly in the fabric. "Gar ash'amur…died, you…ash'amur, inside me…" Her delirious rant cut off, breaking into something half-way between an in-drawn breath and a sob as Lethe began to shake in his arms with a force that rocked her whole body.

With a disgusted curse for the hu'uun who'd worked whatever mind-fuck this was, Canderous carried Lethe to his bed and laid her down before her increasingly violent seizures could connect with anything vital.

She wouldn't let go of him, forcing Canderous to pry her fingers loose from the crumpled fabric of his shirt. Free now, her fingers went instantly to her skull, obviously the locus of her pain, where she dug them into the skin of her temples with enough force to bruise, to draw blood. Her eyes screwed shut, watering so badly that she cried, her mouth opening in a silent cry of pain.

When her fingers dragged towards her eyes Canderous grabbed her hands by the wrists and pinned them beside her. She was still stronger than she looked; the force of her seizures nearly enough to throw Canderous off of her, and he was obliged to use his full weight to pin her down by bracing his knee on the bed. This close, he could smell the saline in the sweat pouring off her temples, pooling in the shallow dip formed between her neck and collarbone, running down between her heaving breasts.

He could even feel her breath on his mouth as she attempted to draw in oxygen around the soundless screams setting her features in a rictus of pain.

Canderous had seen soldiers die. Had heard them die, male and female, was no stranger to the mercy of a single, well-placed shot when their legs were the bloody tangle of tissue caused by a tripped mine and the enemy was closing in. But this: this was cowardice. And Canderous had a pretty good guess who was responsible.

Lethe started babbling, eventually: an illegible string of warnings about a Mando'ad dying in water and monsters in tombs that obviously didn't register to her shattered mind. When she started apologizing to her pilot, Canderous tuned her out. Finally she exhausted herself, her body gone limp beneath him, her only words some nonsense about blood and lightening.

"Killed him," she rasped, her voice mostly gone. "Wanted you to kneel."

By the blue slowly creeping back into her eyes, encroaching on her dilated pupils, Canderous decided she was coming out of it. He wondered if she'd remember any of what she'd just said. "Who?"

"Bendak." Her voice broke on the word, and she coughed.

It was not the name Canderous had hoped for. It didn't change his answer. "I bore witness."

"Oh." Lethe blinked, forcing the rest of the moisture out of her eyes. The tears caught in her thick lashes, sticking them together. She looked confused, mostly, taking in the relative position of their limbs, his proximity. Then: "I…didn't try to kill you, did I?"

It made sense that she wouldn't remember. If her true name did this to her, whoever had done the number on her head would've made sure Lethe never knew about it. Canderous stood, hauling her to her feet as he did so. "Don't worry about it."

It wasn't a real answer, and she noticed. Lethe looked at him sharply, but the effect was ruined by the jerky, unsteadiness of her movement. Then, instead of calling him on it, she said: "I need to get to the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine."

"_Naysh_."

Lethe looked surprised at his vehement denial. "They know the war's over, Canderous. For what it's worth, I swear by my honor that I will do all I can to keep you from harm."

Canderous didn't suppress his bark of incredulous laughter at the idea of her giving her word to protect him. Nothing about her was as he'd expected.

Lethe frowned, folding her arms. "If you won't go, just take us where we can rendezvous with the Republic fleet. We can get to Dantooine on our own from there. I need their help, in case you couldn't tell." The sudden, hard set to her jaw said she was determined to follow her course.

She would go to Dantooine with or without him, and Canderous would be a fool not to follow. The Jetiise obviously wanted her alive and indebted, to stoop to a stunt like this, and Canderous could think of only one thing they would want her for. She was Revan, still, and any fight he followed her to would be worthy. "You're set on this."

"Yes." Her voice was even harder than her eyes.

"We'll leave now," he said, because they were on a world crawling with Sith, in a position growing less secure by the minute.

He led her back through the hallways to the guest wing, where he was immediately confronted with one narked off Jetii. Her fists were on her hips, and in another situation her belligerent stance would have been amusing.

"What happened?" Bastila demanded.

"Plan's changed," Canderous said. "We go now."

He didn't wait for her to get in line and follow. Lethe would, and the Jetii would be forced to come along. He led them to the nearest security console, where he overrode the hangar's security system and set all of the security doors to lockdown. They didn't want any more company.

They had only just reached the hangar when the ground bucked, and the ceiling groaned, sending chunks of the bay's infrastructure raining down.

"The Sith are bombarding the planet!" Lethe shouted over the roar of explosions, of the permacrete bay floors cracking and heaving beneath them.

Canderous didn't bother asking how she knew.

At that precise moment, Davik and Calo came in at a run from the far entrance. Canderous grinned. He didn't hear or care what either of them were yelling, and when they went for their weapons he was already releasing his trigger squeeze, the large blast of energy he had fired colliding with the cracked ceiling above their heads. Calo just had time to pull a thermal detonator before he was buried, along with Davik.

"Get on the ship!" he yelled at the women, and they wasted no time boarding the _Hawk_ while he brought up the rear.

On board, the Jetii was already starting the _Hawk_'s liftoff sequence. "The rest of our people are at the Northern apartments in Upper Taris," she said. "I do hope this vessel is in good condition."

"It'll outfly and outgun any fighter in either fleet."

His words were proved true when the _Hawk_ nimbly dodged a blast lancing straight down from the Sith war ships in orbit.

"There," the woman said serenely, making for one of the tall apartment buildings.

Canderous could just make out the tiny figures of humanoids on its roof. "I'll open the boarding ramp."

Lethe was already there, doubled over around one of the ramp supports.

"This door's opening in five," he said. "Better clear out."

She did, stumbling out of the way, and pressed her back against the bulkheads, legs braced wide for balance. "We gave them time to vacate. To the outer rim. It was waiting."

_No shit_. Canderous braced himself with a hand on one of the boarding ramp's supports as it lowered, the _Hawk _hovering over the roof's surface.

"Move it!" he shouted.

The pilot herded the others on board, and Canderous punched the control sequence to close the ramp as soon as Carth's feet were on it. T3 rolled off in the direction of the navicomputer with a whistle, and Canderous started giving orders.

"Cockpit's that way," he said to Onasi, jerking a thumb over his shoulder and already talking to the Wookie, who he sent to the gun turret.

"And keep that Jetii with you!" he yelled after Onasi, as Lethe slid off the bulkhead to the floor, pale and shaking.

"Wh-what about me?"

Canderous looked at the little blue Twi'lek who had spoken. "Find somewhere your friend can lie down. And make sure that Jetii steers clear of her," he added, before taking off in the direction of the second turret.

Lethe allowed her general to throw slender, undeveloped shoulders under her arm, half-carrying her from the slaughter. "Call it, Meetra," she gasped, the pain in her side stealing her breath like a vacuum. "Air strike. I'll shield us. Call it."

"Carth will be back any minute." Meetra, her face blue as a clear sky on Coruscant, her visible horror just as rare. "Hang on, Lethe. Here, lie down. Lie down; that's it."

In a brief flash of clarity Lethe was able to appreciate that the bed was softer than she would've credited a crime lord for shelling out for; she wondered that it was clearly meant for two before the pain hammered into her skull, causing her to curl into herself and clutch at her head.

She shuddered under the brief onslaught of a torture-shock, as though Trask's killer were flooding her body with lightening.

And she saw, felt, herself spread under the sculpted body of a man with tattoos curling over his skull. The heat off his breath, off his body, settled somewhere between her belly and her hips, leaving Lethe weak and aching. She felt his force-bright hands tormenting her, tasted the long digit glowing blue with electricity in her mouth like sucking a power node.

"Alek:" a name, a plea, someone else's moan in her mouth as Lethe felt the cruel heat pooling in her core, felt the electric shock of his stroking fingers on her, in her, until she screamed with a force that threw her head back. Once she started, she couldn't stop, and it was only mostly in pain. An agony like bliss ratcheted through her, making Lethe writhe and plead and cry until light tore everything from her.

"I think she's waking up. Give her some space! Lethe? Can you hear me?"

_Carth_, she tried to answer, but what came out broke in her throat, rising into something halfway between a whimper and a yell. There were hands on her, and all she could see was blood. Blood, on her hands, on her thighs, streaking the decks of the flagship behind the Mandalorian who had dragged himself on his arms after her to stand beside his leader. The spattered white of bone was visible jutting through his kneecap, his thigh, the burn her saber'd left angry across his face.

"Mandalore," someone croaked, and then everything burned away again.

"I know," she heard, floating through her consciousness as though across dark, broken waters. "I remember, even if you can't. You told me to follow you, and I will. To Oblivion, if I have to." A grim chuckle like whiskey over gravel, then: "But you'll have to wake up if you plan to make good on your oath."

_Canderous_. Just a vague shape beside her, but she reached out anyway, and felt her hand clasped in a large, powerful one.

The contact didn't ground her for long, and soon she felt someone reaching into her mind with cold fingers that would obliterate everything, change everything, leave a shell of her behind. And Lethe knew there was only one way to escape terrible fate of Oblivion that threatened her. One way: the way of pain, of fury, of darkness. "Never," she snarled, lashing out with everything left and _ripping_. There was a sound like tearing metal as she reached for the darkness and drew it around herself like a cloak.

At last, there was nothing.


	7. Dantooine: Beacon of Hope

**A/N:** I did try to write this chapter light, but it just wasn't happening. My intent is not to mishandle delicate issues, so if you feel I've inadvertently done so, do tell me. Translations: _aliit_- family, clan, squad (depending on whose dictionary you use).

* * *

"Back so soon?" Zhar asked mildly.

The Mandalorian came into the room, stopping a full pace behind Zhar's chair. Zhar could sense a recent battle and smell blood, but he didn't turn around from bathing his comatose apprentice's brow.

"She hasn't changed."

"It might amuse you to learn how right you are." She had always been strong in the force, and others were drawn to her through it even when she had been a newly arrived youngling with dirt on her knees and snarls in her hair. _I let you out of my sight for but a moment, and you return with a Wookie's life debt and a Mandalorian. What am I to do with you, child?_

Canderous stepped forward, standing at Zhar's elbow and casting a large shadow over the bed. Revan stirred. She responded most, if at all, to the Mandalorian's presence, as much as Zhar could wish it otherwise. Vrook was of the opinion they should bar Canderous from entering the Enclave, but Vrook had forgotten the reason they had been loath to sanction Revan's aid to the Republic in the first place. Zhar had not. Vrook, in his short-sighted but well intentioned ways, believed Malak was the only reason they had eased the mental block Bastila created. And Zhar wasn't the only one who didn't. "How long will you follow her?"

"Until she doesn't need me."

Zhar finally looked at Canderous, briefly, out of the corner of his eye. That one did not show his face even when his war helm was so tucked under his arm. He was difficult, but not impossible to read. "Better men than you have broken themselves on their loyalty to her."

To his credit, Canderous didn't take it as the insult it wasn't. "The better man isn't always the stronger one, Jetii."

At least he answered well. "True enough. Her pilot barely leaves that ship." Neither of them had been discussing Carth Onasi, but it was a point that bore drawing attention to. "Sit with her if you will. I shall return." Zhar rose from the vigil he had kept for the better part of a week and left Revan alone with her Mandalorian. He would sense it, if anything changed.

* * *

_The woman in black stalked through the fields like a Kodan lion on the prowl, scenting out her quarry. It was untouched; ancient, it waited for those who would never return. It recognized her being: the fury, the fear, the rotting ache of jealousy pouring off the man at her elbow. A simple touch of force was all it took, and the tomb opened._

She felt a touch like a warning, like a memory of danger from a half-forgotten dream. _It _was waiting, she thought, but no, the danger feeling spiked and vanished as Lethe forced her eyes open. The shock that hit her like falling dursasteel wasn't her own. "Wh–" Her voice croaked, and she coughed, hard, at the itch that settled in. When the fit passed, the ceiling came into focus first: slatted, made of a rich, burgundy colored wood. Not Taris. Lethe tried to remember what had happened, but the effort brought on a swift, nauseating pain straight between her brows and she reached blindly behind her head, and pulled the pillow over her eyes.

A dry chuckle with an edge of relief, and someone took it away from her. "You're not falling out on me that fast."

_Canderous_. It took another moment for everything to come back into focus again, and then Lethe managed to turn her head enough to see him. He was sitting in a chair pulled close to her…bed, Lethe decided. This was no ship, and he was wearing Mandalorian armor that she didn't recall him owning, streaked with mud and blood. "Dant–" She started coughing again.

He gave her a scowl that failed to be intimidating. "Yeah, we're on Dantooine. Quit trying to talk; you've been out of it for almost two weeks."

"You have returned to us, child."

Lethe craned her neck, and saw the new speaker: an elder Twi'lek, male, dressed in blue Jedi robes, entering the room. His name came to her out of nowhere. "Master Zhar?" Her voice was a thin, rasping croak, but it was there, finally.

The Jedi couldn't have looked more surprised if someone had splashed the water he was holding in his face. "Do you remember me?"

"No," Lethe croaked, and coughed.

Canderous gave her an inscrutable look, vacating the chair in deference to the Jedi.

Lethe could feel Master Zhar using the force on her, easing the dryness out of her throat as he slid a worn, gentle hand under her neck, slowing the water to a trickle so that Lethe could drink without sitting up. She wasn't sure she could have if she'd tried.

When she'd had as much as she could stand, which was not much, Lethe said: "I just know you." He thought mirrors were a vanity and had no tolerance for Toydarian whisky. She told him so, and watched a sad, nostalgic smile touch his eyes briefly. A thought occurred to Lethe, and she ground her jaw, hard, on a sudden urge to laugh. "I'm going mad."

"No, child," the Jedi said gently. "The force is showing you things your mind is not prepared to take. We can help you, with Jedi training. Meditation will ease the burden."

Canderous snorted midway through what Master Zhar was saying. "Meditation. You need to eat about twice your body weight and get in a good fight."

As someone who'd used to work solo, running a tight ship on a tighter code without room for slack, Lethe appreciated his more utile concern. It let her focus on what she could fix, and took her mind from the self-recrimination that came from being the weak link on the team. And she preferred it to being hovered over, no matter how grateful she was to the Jedi and– where _was_ Carth? In a way that was too awful not to be hilarious, waking up from a blackout didn't feel right without him. Recalling the last time she'd seen him– the Sith base on Taris– sent ice slithering down her spine. "Taris. The bombardment. Did–?"

Master Zhar raised his hand. "Peace, child. Your friends are here, and well."

Lethe breathed, and allowed herself to relax back into the blankets. She felt chilled, still, and vaguely feverish, but that was probably due to the two week hole in her memory. As much as Jedi training could bring unwanted complication to her life in the fleet, she had had enough of whatever was wrong with her after the first blackout. Anymore, and Lethe was going to give the nearest blaster pistol a blow job. "This training: when can I start?"

"The sooner the better, I think. In the morning, if you are well enough. But first, I'm sure you'll want to see your companions."

Canderous grinned at that, and there was something almost predatory in the white flash of teeth. "Brace yourself. That blue chatterbox is going to ricochet off the walls when she hears you're up. And Fleet thinks the Jetiise are up to something; I might have to incapacitate him to get him in here."

* * *

Carth was considering the way light reflected off the black crystal of his whiskey glass when the light streaming in from the _Hawk_'s open ramp abruptly cut off. He looked up, and what he saw gave him a cold chill, turning the warmth of the liquor to ice in his stomach. The part of his brain that still had all systems at go said: _It's got to be Canderous, calm the frack down_, but the rest of him was remembering the smell of the forest fire started by his shot-down fighter, the sick feeling as he reacted to the crunch of a twig when the Mandalorians caught up to him. He'd never get used to seeing that T-shaped visor from this close. "Would you take that damn helmet off?"

"Easy, Fleet." Canderous' voice sounded amused from inside the helmet, but when he took it off he didn't look it. He put the helmet down on the table next to Carth's glass. "We're on the same side."

Carth turned the helmet the other way almost reflexively, so the visor was facing Canderous. He didn't want to know where the armor had come from, and didn't ask. "What side is that?"

"Hers. She's awake."

Carth felt hope swell up in him, brief and terrifying until he quashed it. He knew where hope got him. He'd been at her side for days on Taris, a week, on the _Hawk_, and days more once they'd landed before he finally realized what he was doing to himself. He was letting himself get caught up in it: the lies, the manipulations, whatever the Jedi were planning. He had let himself care, beyond what he should for a crewmate, when Telos had taught him better. But…"What did the Jedi say to her? Are they–"

"Ask her yourself. Blue's already with her." Canderous pointed a finger at him. "And I will knock you out and drag you in there if I have to. Don't make me put the helmet back on, Republic."

Looking at his stony face, Carth couldn't tell whether Canderous was being serious or not. "What's it to you, anyway?"

If it weren't too ridiculous, Carth almost could've thought the anger in Canderous' tone was injury. "You're part of her aliit, whether you like it or not, and if you're too big of a coward to go in there and tell her whatever you think the Jetiise are concocting, then you're just going to get one of us killed down the line. Whatever your malfunction is, fix it, or take a hike."

Carth laughed. This was too rich. "So you _care_ about Lethe, is that it?" Carth wasn't blind, had seen for himself the way Canderous had looked at her during their flight from Taris. She had been completely out of it the whole trip to Dantooine, crying out in her sleep, lashing out with the force and tearing holes in the bulkheads. He hadn't even known she could feel the force, until that day on Taris when Bastila had said it happened sometimes, when force-sensitives weren't trained from a young age. Where Bastila had gritted her teeth and had a look of fierce determination when she'd held her down, and Mission looked caught between wanting to cry and wanting to bolt, Canderous just looked at Lethe like– like Carth had looked at the sky, when he'd got shot down. Who knew what a guy like Canderous was really after?

"If you tell me you don't, you'll be a liar and a coward."

That was an avoidance if Carth had ever heard one, but Canderous wasn't the only one playing that card around here. No one had seen Bastila since they'd landed, and Carth couldn't get a straight answer out of any of the Jedi. And Carth…did care, because after losing everything once it was hard not to hold on to what fate tossed him. "Then I guess we're both fools." Carth threw back his drink and left. But he couldn't quite shake the pricking at the back of his neck as he made for the Enclave.

When they'd finally landed on Dantooine after the hell-week of a trip over, the courtyard he strode through had been flooded with Jedi. They swooped in and carried Lethe off as soon as the ramp was open, exactly like they'd swooped in and taken over the _Endar Spire_ right before her last voyage. Carth didn't appreciate being taken for a ride, and suspected the Jedi had known, back then, that Lethe was force-sensitive and had been planning to recruit her. They had requested her specifically as a last-minute transfer. It was all just too convenient. What didn't make sense was why no one had said anything, if they'd all known something like this could happen.

Shaking his head at himself, Carth scrubbed a hand over his face. He really should've shaved, and thought about going back to the _Hawk_, but that was cowardice talking, as much as he hated to admit when Canderous was right. Besides, he could already hear Mission's excited voice from down the hall, and it was possible Lethe could tell he was there, with the force and all.

When he reached the room, the door was slid open. Lethe looked up almost the second he was inside, and her face lit up in a smile. Carth wondered if she lit up like that for Canderous, too.

"Guess what?!" Mission exclaimed. "Lethe's going to be a Jedi!"

Lethe laughed. "No, I'm–"

"A Jedi," Carth repeated. So he'd been right. He looked at her, trying to read the face he thought he'd come to know on Taris. Had she known all along she was getting picked up for the Order? _ No_, Carth thought, _she would've said something, they always say something when they're about to back out.._. But that was what he got for caring, and Carth heard himself asking the same question he had years ago. "So that's it, then? You're leaving the fleet?"

"What? No; what are you talking about?" Something must've showed on his face, because Lethe tried to sit up, but it was the most she'd moved in weeks and Mission had to help her.

The guilt was quick to rear its head. It was like being on Taris again, when she couldn't even walk to the fresher after waking up, when Carth had been sick with worry over losing the last of his soldiers. Carth stepped forward, about to apologize when Mission blocked his way.

She gave him a glare only a teenager could, and shook a slender blue finger under his nose. "I don't think so, buster. You've been moping around since Taris, so you don't get to walk in here and be all mad for no reason! No offense, Lethe," she added over her shoulder with a flick of her lekku, "but if I don't hear an apology out of this nerf-herder in the next four seconds I'm going to sic Big Z on him. One."

"I'm sorry!" Carth said, holding up his hands in surrender. He looked at Lethe over Mission's head, whose mouth was slowly turning at the corners in a bemused grin, and sighed. He'd gone and blown it, but good. He hadn't meant it to go like that. "Could you uh– give us a minute, Mission?"

Mission looked at him cock-eyed, then nodded, and through the door she slid shut behind her could be heard muttering, "Have to do everything around here."

Carth didn't quite know what to say. Looking at Lethe, he was struck by how far they were from the two soldiers who'd crash landed on Taris. Then, their dynamic had been simple, easy. Now she was…not quite a Jedi, but that wouldn't last long. She wasn't really his to look out for anymore, not that he'd done any of his last command much good. "I owe you an apology. What I said, the way I acted just now– it was out of line."

She scrubbed a hand over her face, and managed to look, of all things, guilty. "I know this's been hard on you. Believe me, if I'd ever had an inkling this would happen I would've disclosed it in my medical exam. And even if I'd known, I don't think I could've kept it quiet if I'd wanted to."

Carth sighed, angrily, at his inability to explain. "It's not that– that you're force sensitive; that's not it." It was a gift, what she had, that the Jedi should've helped her control instead of using to control her. Carth knew it was above his paygrade, what the Jedi did, but he still just couldn't stomach her going along with their little scheme, like she was completely fine with the lies, the manipulations. Like she could drop her oath to the Republic to chase some big, powerful destiny, like–

Had her gaze always been that penetrating?

"Canderous said you think the Jedi are up to something. Carth, what's going on?"

Did she have him dialed in because of their time on Taris, or because of the force? Carth didn't know. He just knew she was the last of his ill-fated command, and…the closest thing he'd allowed himself to a friend since Saul, and letting go was hard. So he took the chair, and tried to explain: "In space, between here and Taris…it was really bad. You were barely ever lucid, and I was– I worried. You were like that the whole trip here: in pain, out of it. And then we got here, and I thought, we all thought, everything was going to be all right, but the Jedi, they– they just seemed to _know,_ to be expecting you here in that condition, and it was like there was something no one was saying. I don't like being left out of the loop, and it was just like…like, I don't know, they planned the whole thing. You were a last minute transfer on the _Endar_ _Spire_, specifically requested by the Jedi. It was just so convenient, and then now you're signing up with them–"

"Carth," Lethe cut him off. "That's–" she reached out, as though she were about to put her hand on his knee, but then frowned and let it fall back to the bed. "That's really paranoid."

He'd heard that one before. "Maybe; But that doesn't mean I'm wrong. Besides, I have my reasons."

"Care to share?"

Carth studied her: the woman who'd woken up on Taris unable to walk straight and still won a death match that same day; who'd helped the beggars in the Lowercity Carth would've just as soon ignored; who was the only person stubborn enough to put up with him, when even Carth's junior officers had jumped and stuttered when he questioned them about the minute details of their reports; and came to a decision.

"Saul Karath," he said. "Admiral Karath. He was my great friend, my mentor, my hero, until he became everything we both hated." Carth laughed, heard the cracks at the edges of his voice that told him he was coming off crazy. "He told me he was joining the Sith, that I should, too. 'Think of your family,' he told me. It wasn't long after that that he gave the order to start the bombardment of Telos IV, my home world. He killed countless innocents, my family included, betraying his command, betraying me, and betraying his oath to the Republic Fleet."

"So you're worried that…what, the Jedi are trying to make me a Sith?"

"No!" Carth let out a groan of frustration, pushing a hand a through his hair. Here he was, trying to do the trust thing, and sounding like an idiot. "Look, I'm sorry. Just…the oath we took to the Republic: I thought it meant more to you. I didn't think you'd leave to be a Jedi, and I think they've been watching you for months, waiting for this to happen so that they could blindside you into joining up. But, hell– I know I've got some issues, alright? And I don't think I can let them go. Can you be okay with that?"

"We've all got issues, Carth. I don't know what the deal with the Jedi is, but Canderous doesn't seem to be bothered by them, and he's got better reason than the rest of us to be waiting for them to make a wrong move. And I'm not looking to become a Jedi." She laughed. "I mean, can you imagine? A smuggler-Jedi whose first solution to every problem is to find the Cantina? But, seriously, it's obvious I'm no good without the clarity their training can give me. I'm a danger to everyone without it. And…you're right, I did take that oath, but if I can do the Republic more good as a Jedi, don't I have a duty to pursue that?"

Carth slumped in the chair with a defeated sigh. She made too much sense for him to stay mad. "I guess so. And I'm sorry, again; will you forgive me?"

"I forgave you as soon as you said it." She gave him a slightly skewed smile. "Now, what do you think the chances of sneaking me out are? Mission said something about sponge baths, but the first person who tries it is losing a hand, Jedi or not."


	8. Dantooine: What You Gain by Losing

**A/N:** aruetii: non-mandalorian; te Ani'la Mand'alor: Mandalore the Ultimate. I apologize for the repost, but this chapter needed some retcon. I changed a few things that were bugging me, but it's largely the same. Also! Thanks to the guest reviewers. I can't message-reply to you guys but I wanted to say I appreciate the support.

* * *

_Revan's footfalls were as soft as the darkness stealing into Canderous' vision, reverberating soundlessly through the deckplates and into his skull. He was the only one to bear witness, but soon he would join his brothers. Like the evidence of his ruined leg, sanguine-slicked decks marking where he'd dragged himself through the flagship, soon there would be nothing to mark what had happened but a trail of blood. _

_Her face, as beautiful in unwonted grief as in rage, was swallowed first; then her body, then her legs, until all Canderous could see were the boots, inches from his face. _

"_No." A voice like spice wine. "Live. I'll have need of you."_

_Darkness, and something like heat as he felt his bones and flesh reknitting._

_The darkness became the steel-barred pit of a room on Nar Shadaa. He was lucid enough to know her for a hallucination, supplied by the fever as he lay sweating poison. His new implant was working overtime to expel the toxins from his body, but after a month he doubted it would be enough. Jetii robes the color of an unlit lake melted into shadows that curved enticingly around her fair skin. Her hair was fairer still, and soft as shimmersilk on his face, his neck, as she knelt over him. Her eyes were gold as fire. When Canderous tried to touch her, she dissolved into the darkness, whispering: "Live."_

Canderous woke up suddenly, picked up his repeater and had the source of the breathing targeted in the split second before he remembered this wasn't Taris. The irregular shadow curled up in the air speeder he'd taken from the dar'manda was Mission, not one of the female informants Davik liked to send to him.

Canderous looked at his chrono; it read 0417.

If he'd woken up like this on Taris, he would've used whatever would-be seductress hard and thrown her out– her clothes, too if he was feeling generous– with nothing to report back but what the marks left by his teeth and fingers did already. On other nights he dreamed, Canderous would've sought out Bendak and gone hunting for something to kill. There was no shortage, on a world like Taris.

On a world like Dantooine, the only women sneaking into his territory in the middle of the night were sarcastic teenagers with no ulterior motives but the sound of someone else's untroubled breathing. Canderous got up, and looked over at where Mission was bunked down in the speeder's cockpit. She slept with the rifle they'd modified with a bipod and scope. Not many would suspect the heart of a warrior beat in that small body; Mission Vao, following her wookie friend and a group of near-strangers into certain peril, was a creature of loyalty and fierce, self-contained honor. Canderous might've considered adopting her, if the clans weren't broken.

Amused at his nostalgia, he shook his head, and let her sleep.

The faint, insistent beeping of the ship's completed diagnostic alert told him Carth had fallen asleep in the cockpit again. He'd be nearly intolerable when he woke up, which could be at any given point between now and 0700. Canderous suspected Zaalbar would hunt well, but he only spoke Shyyriiwook, and Canderous didn't.

He went out to hunt alone.

* * *

_She could feel everything the Zeltron joy boy and his client behind the glass were feeling, so lost in the Force and the glitterstim that it was all she could do to clutch at the sheets for purchase. She could feel her air supply decreasing, as if it were her throat with a strong, purple-black forearm wrapped around it. She could feel the hand in her hair, baring her ear for a hot, questing tongue and nipping teeth. Then pain, brief and bright and merciful against the hole he had left in her soul._

_Alek found her like that, dazed, eyes glazed with spice drugs and gasping at the dispassionate kiss of a stiletto knife against someone else's thighs. She felt his shock, his horror, as he gathered her into his arms and carried her away, the beautiful pain dissolving in the light of his aura._

Lethe woke up to a feeling like sunlight, which was even more disturbing than the dream vision given that her room was pitch black. She threw back the covers and put her feet on the floor, and then blinked the sleep out of her eyes while she decided whether or not to tell the Jedi she'd had the first vision since waking up from the last blackout.

_Yeah,_ Lethe thought, _no._ Explaining that one to a bunch of shocked and appalled Jedi was not her idea of contributing to the war effort. She was pretty sure her familiarity as an ex-smuggler with spice's telepathic qualities was not what they'd want to question her about, anyway.

A glance at the chrono told her it was 0417: early enough that none of the Jedi would miss her if she slipped out to clear her head. Truth be told, Lethe was mostly relieved the vision hadn't come with any of the sickness or memory loss she'd come to associate them with. Hopefully it was a sign she'd recovered, which meant it was high time for Lethe to start focusing on regaining her physical strength as opposed to just mental.

The footlocker at the foot of her bed had been moved in from the _Hawk_. It contained her holopad, her vibrosword, and her Jochelian armor. Also, at the bottom, was the lightsaber she'd taken off Trask's killer what felt like ages ago. Lethe picked it up, considering. She'd heard there were crystal caves infested with kinrath on the Khoonda plains. Anyone could use a lightsaber like a vibrosword, but it took a Force user to deflect a blaster shot or to build or modify one, due to the delicacy of the design. She wondered if she could do it.

* * *

In the dark before even the pre-dawn grey crept onto the horizon, Lethe was still easy to spot coming out of the Enclave. Her hair, long enough now to require pins if she didn't want it obstructing her line of sight, caught what starlight came through the cloud coverage.

"If you're looking to check up on them, they're all asleep," Canderous said.

She hadn't noticed him in the shadow of the _Hawk_'s boarding ramp, and didn't seem displeased that he was there. "No, actually. I was going to hunt kinrath." She looked him over, her eyes lighting on his armor, his repeater. "What about you?"

"Kinrath, eh? I hadn't decided yet." He hadn't expected her out, either, especially at this hour. The Jetiise hadn't exactly ordered her to be on quarters, but it was all but understood she didn't leave the Enclave. "Your Jetiise won't like you taking off without notice."

She smirked: a lift at both corners of her mouth that bared her incisors in a brief flash of white in the dark, an expression belonging to a different facial structure. It was the same smile she'd given him when she'd told him to follow her into the Sith base, and it wasn't her own. "So don't tell them. Besides, weren't you the one who said I needed a good fight?" She called and shot the lightsaber that had been hanging by her belt. "Let's go find one."

Canderous had half forgotten that the blade was red. It cast a sanguine glow on her white shirt, her bare arms, creating all too familiar shadows on her neck. He put his helmet on, and the night-vision turned everything green, obliterating the shadows. "Lead on."

Lethe turned, and Canderous followed behind her where he could analyze her movements. On Taris, she had moved differently when she remembered than she had otherwise. Now, Canderous realized there were layers. The leonine gait he was watching now was a baseline. When she fought, the fluidity of Jetii forms became evident, but sometimes…there was raw, brute power that belonged to a different body infusing hers.

Answers were what Canderous had first wanted, more questions were what he had. Questions, and a clear road to an honorable end no matter how it all played out. The rest of his people were not so fortunate. Very few of them had any honor left; Bendak had been the only one left on Taris, at the end. Canderous didn't know if Bendak had recognized Lethe, but he suspected he would've fought her anyway. It would've been a last act of devotion to Kad Ha'rangir, to Bendak's way of thinking.

To Canderous' way of thinking, things had a way of coming out eventually. He planned on being there when they did. In the meantime, he could use a good fight as much as Lethe could.

It was unlikely her eyes were as good as his night vision, but Lethe made for the cave at the same time Canderous located it, a sign that her command of the Jetii magic had come back to her.

At the entrance, Lethe spun her lightsaber one-handed, and the tips of her fingers brightened with Force power. "Ready?"

"Ready." Canderous' helmet filtered out most of the cave's smell, the pungent odor of Kinrath living in an enclosed space for years upon years, but not enough that he couldn't tell which direction their nesting chamber lay in.

Lethe smelled– or sensed, not that it mattered– it too, and her gait was a predator's slow stalk as she approached the nest-cavern's mouth. A screeching hiss accompanied the first wave of kinrath to converge on her, drawn to the heat of her body and her blade. Lethe struck high, and Canderous rolled under her guard, out of the choke point created by the tunnel's opening and fired into the swarming mass of arachnoids.

It was visceral, killing them at close quarters with a weapon meant to be used at a distance, creating smoking craters and taking off limbs, spraying blood and the ichor contained in their poison glands. More came from the far back of the cave, and Canderous pitched a thermal detonator into the swarming mass, shouted: "Grenade!"

Lethe turned her body from the eye-searing light of the reaction. The kinrath inside its five meter kill-radius atomized, creating a gaping hole in their numbers that Canderous threw himself into with a roar. It was easy to forget the mass of them, from far away, but close enough to touch they stood over two meters. Canderous dodged the limbs stabbing downward like giant pincers, firing straight up into their bellies.

It was over all too soon.

Lethe took the last of them, spinning her blade before impaling the wounded creature with a two-handed, downward thrust. In the lume created by the crystal formations refracting the light of her saber, she was as lethally beautiful as she'd ever been. Kinrath blood streaked all the way up her boots to her thighs, turning the Republic fatigue pants she wore a mottled color, and flecked her arms, and neck, and face. The blood of her kill became her.

"Help me harvest these crystals?" Lethe wiped the blood from her face with the lifted hem of her shirt, baring a brief flash of her taught stomach before, oblivious, she made for one of the crystal formations.

Canderous drew his boot knife and cut into one of the egg sacks. The un-hatched kinrath fed on the crystals, and the breeding adults lay their eggs around them before the shells hardened. "You're modifying your lightsaber."

"If I don't blow myself up trying."

Canderous chuckled. "You won't."

She smiled at him. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

There was something narcissistic about taking pleasure in her gratitude, and it was with some amusement that Canderous wondered if he was the fool Carth had named him. In answer, he merely grunted. It was the Jetii Vrook's fault she even craved the confidence– and not merely the obedience– of her followers, probably. The Jetiise here, barring Zhar, all seemed bent on making her less. For all the good it didn't. He watched her, from behind the visor, appreciating the subtle power in her musculature. "I've had better fights, though." If it only cost him another broken leg...

* * *

"Don't be jealous, Carth," Mission snickered. "It's a sparring match, not a come-on. It's not like he's sweeping her off to some tropical moon."

Lethe laughed loudly. The idea of the rough Mandalorian basking on some beach somewhere while she frolicked in the water was so off it was hilarious.

Her laughter provoked a dark look from Carth that undeniably resembled a pout. "I'm not being jealous." He crossed his arms, slouching on the bench that wrapped around the tree in the Enclave's midst. "I just don't like the way he looks at you."

Canderous didn't look at Lethe like anything she had noticed, but if he did it was probably in relation to her fighting form. It was nice, not to feel the nearly constant weight of being watched when she was around him. It made her feel less heavy, somehow, like the Force's sudden crushing presence was just the next damn thing and it really hadn't altered her, really wasn't something she couldn't handle. Everyone else…hovered, or trod glass. Lethe knew if she could count on anyone to give her a good match it would be the Mandalorian, who respected her strength as it was without trying to caution or coddle her.

And anyway, it wouldn't last long. There really wasn't anything aside from the dubious ownership status of the _Hawk_ keeping Canderous there. Lethe hadn't questioned his presence since waking up, as he simply seemed to belong, but she would be sorry to see him go when he inevitably did. If Canderous was laying low in case the Exchange decided to look into the circumstances of their late crime lord's death, he would likely move on sooner rather than later.

That would make Carth happy, at least. Resolving to ask Canderous, later, Lethe offered: "You can watch, if you're that worried."

Carth looked like he wanted to say yes, but then he shook his head. "There isn't a big Republic presence on this world, because of the Jedi. You'd think that would make it easier on the settlers, but no one seems to have the time for them. To tell you the truth, I've been feeling pretty useless, so I uh– I agreed to help some of them out. You know, disputes."

Mission muttered, the words 'moping' and 'own fault' just audible.

"Anyway," Carth said, loud enough to drown out Mission, "Just be careful, alright?"

Carth was going to go grey, worrying the way he did. "Protecting my honor, flyboy?" Lethe shoved Carth playfully, winking. "I'd be more worried for him if I were you; I never could resist a pretty face."

After a stunned moment, Carth started to grin, and then to chuckle.

They were both laughing when Canderous arrived, and Carth trailed off with an agitated sigh, and stood up.

Mission followed, hefting her rifle that had been re-fitted with a bipod and a scope. "What?" she said at their look. "Someone's got to keep this old geezer out of trouble. Besides," she flicked her lekku over her shoulder, straightening. "I've been taking lessons."

Lethe arched an eyebrow at Canderous, who answered with a look that was not innocent.

Mission held out her hand imperiously, and Canderous gave her what looked like the keys to an air speeder. "C'mon, Carth," Mission said over her shoulder, not waiting as she walked out.

"Now I know who was in charge while I was napping," Lethe said drily.

"That's rich," Carth said over his shoulder as he went after Mission. "Really, I'm laughing on the inside."

Lethe chuckled, and tilted her head towards the room the Jedi used for practice, generally empty at this early hour. "Training room's this way. No weapons alright with you?"

Canderous' fierce grin was answer enough. They both took off their boots when they reached the training room, placing them against one of the walls. "Are you planning on using your Force?"

Lethe shed her outer tunic, knowing the collar presented an easy hold. "No." She hadn't learned combat Force-use, which was not a surprise since there hadn't been much talk of Lethe actually joining the Jedi Order after they'd trained her enough for her to handle herself.

"Then I won't use stims."

"Fair enough." Lethe bent at the waist, the formal bow she would've used with a Jedi Master.

Canderous looked surprised, but slightly pleased, and pounded his fist against his heart.

They circled each other.

Lethe had never seen him fight without a blaster, had never seen any Mandalorian fight unarmed, and didn't know what style to expect. Like Bendak, Canderous had the compounded advantages of height and muscle, and he would know how to use them.

From somewhere in the back of her mind, like an echo through the force, Lethe heard a voice say in harsh Mando'a: "_Clan Ordo. They like their heavy blasters and explosives, but only a di'kut would take them on unarmed. It's their shins and their fists you should watch for."_

Hands up, fingers loose and slightly splayed, she danced right of the hook aimed at her ear and rushed in to strike him across the neck with the side of her forearm.

Canderous staggered, the shin he slammed into Lethe's hip impacting with less force than it might have, still enough to make her grunt and drop her weight as she wrapped her hand around the side of his head. He had to follow the momentum of her arm to avoid losing the ear, but Canderous closed his hand in Lethe's shirt and dragged her down with him.

The force of his shove sent Lethe skidding across the floor on her back, leaving a running burn down her spine. Canderous rolled onto his knees and came at her.

Expecting this, Lethe wrapped her long legs around his waist and twisted her hips with a force that sent him to the floor, rolling with him, coming up astride his torso, her hands up to block his savage uppercut.

Lethe seized the arm that lashed towards her chin and wrenched it sideways in an arm-bar, not hard enough to pull it from the socket.

Canderous smashed his head into the side of her skull.

Reeling, Lethe's grip slackened just enough for Canderous to wrench his arm free and throw her off of him. This time, Lethe came at him.

He was out of the way of her strike before it could hit, but he hadn't noticed the feint and Lethe managed to hook her legs around his left. She was barely pulling, and another pound of pressure would snap the bone.

Locked together as they were, Lethe was sure Canderous could feel her muscles start to tremble with overexertion, and was proved right when he broke her hold again. He pounced, pinning her down with his forearm against her throat and slowly exerting pressure. Lethe tried to push Canderous off, and then tried to wriggle away, but her muscles were still re-developing and she'd hit failure. It was with a great amount of amusement that Lethe felt the previously steady drum of Canderous' heart quicken against hers, the thin, sweaty material of their shirts very little barrier.

His breath was hot on her face. "Tap out or pass out."

Lethe laughed, her voice coming out a breathy gasp due to the crush of his arm against her throat, and tapped his side. She couldn't remember the last time someone had gotten the better of her in a fight; and it was empowering, in a way, to face off against an equal.

Canderous offered her his hand, and Lethe let him haul her to her feet. She lifted the hem of her shirt and wiped at the sweat dampening her face. Remembering the voice, and wondering why and how the Force would give that for a vision, she asked: "Were there ever Jedi who became Mandalorian?"

Canderous gave her a funny look as he reached for his boots. "Why?"

"Force vision."

After scrutinizing her for a moment, Canderous asked: "Of what?"

Lethe told him, and tried to read his face for a reaction.

A shadow of old pain crossed his face, tightening his jaw, before Canderous shook his head shortly. "No, none of the clans ever adopted Jetiise that I heard of. A few, some of us would've considered, but…" he trailed off, then shrugged and finished putting his boots back on. "Without a new Mand'alor, the clans weren't what they were, after the wars."

Lethe shrugged back into her tunic. "They never regrouped."

"No. We have a code that we follow: resol'nare. Our entire existence is based on it, and those who turn their back on it are dar'manda. Many of us believed, after Revan defeated the Mand'alor and ordered our armor destroyed, that they had been stripped of their identity as Mando'ade along with it. Those who did ended up on worlds like this one, killing people who aren't even threats. They're little more than bandits, now."

Lethe had heard of Mandalorians on Dantooine, knew he had to have acquired the armor at some point since they'd arrived. "You fought them."

"They were dar'manda. Fall once, fall forever."

"Apprentice?"

Lethe turned around, and saw one of the few younglings at the Enclave standing in the doorway, hands clasped in front of him.

"Master Vandar has summoned you."

She looked at Canderous. "I can't promise this won't be boring."

He grunted, and stood up. "You just lead."

* * *

If Carth had been there, Lethe was sure he would've had something to say about the Jedi keeping back intel. Not that Lethe would've been ready to handle this newest gem of information until now.

"I've never even heard of a Force bond before," she said, trying to focus on the feeling of sunlight that Master Zhar had told her was Bastila's presence in her mind. She would've agreed with Carth, up to a point: there was something sordid, invasive about Bastila being in her head without knowing about it. It seemed more intimate than sex, in a way: sharing that much of her thoughts, having a piece of someone else's soul inside her. Master Vandar had assured her that Bastila exerted as little influence over the bond as possible, but even if that was true Lethe wanted to be able to control it as well as she could.

"The Jetii can see your visions through the bond?"

"That's what Master Vrook said." It also explained why the Padawan had been all but avoiding her. The visions weren't exactly there-is-no-passion friendly. _Darth Malak, knight in shining armor my ass. _Lethe snorted to herself. She felt sorry for Bastila, and vaguely guilty, though she couldn't have said why.

Lethe finally managed to get a handle on the bond, and then she was enveloped in warmth. It came in stuttering bursts, and Lethe thought she was doing something wrong before she realized there was an edge of panic to it. Guiltily, Lethe realized Bastila must be terrified. The Masters had said the bond probably developed as a result of Bastila using the Force to save her life– Lethe had been mortified to learn her condition leaving Taris was that serious– and nothing good could have come through yet. Lethe tried to relax, to not force her grasp of their connection, and gradually the warmth settled. Focusing, Lethe heard snatches of Bastila's voice, directing her towards their goal.

The ancient grove, the Masters had said, was tainted by dark side influence and would serve the purpose of testing the depths of the bond. As well as the purpose of cleansing the dark side from said grove, Lethe was sure.

Bastila pointed her to a cluster of standing stones a few hundred yards away, dotted with trees grown gnarled with age. Older specimens of the trees Lethe had seen dotting the plains, they might once have been lush with summer foliage. Now, what leaves hadn't already fallen appeared mottled and grey with mold, almost as though the trees were rotting alive from some unseen poisoned water source. _The plant life is sensitive to the Force_, Lethe realized. _Interesting_. Underfoot the vegetation was soft with blight, muffling her footsteps. She couldn't hear Canderous at all, but knew he was behind her, watching.

Extending her senses the way Master Zhar had showed her, Lethe began to seek out the taint's source. Bastila lighted on a spot ahead, under the standing stones, where the strange sick feeling seemed to be emanating from. The spot was like a collapsed star: a lack of anything but an aching hatred that spread out through the Force across the grove. Whatever it was, it was alive. Lethe signaled an approximation of the distance to Canderous, who nodded and started to flank to the right. Lethe waited a beat, and then kept moving.

When she had reached the last tree blocking her sight of the source, Lethe paused, pressing her front to the tree's trunk, ignoring the feeling of decay that pulsed within it, and looked. A young Cathar woman was kneeling at the base of the stone, her eyes closed in meditation. Clearly, Lethe heard Bastila say in her mind: _"She was a Padawan here, before she fell."_ Dark Jedi, then. Lethe shot her lightsaber, and the instant she did so the woman's eyes snapped open.

"I will be your doom!" the woman screamed, throwing herself forward with the Force. Her lightsaber came to life midair and Lethe had to raise hers high over her head to block the fierce downward strike.

The woman's slitted pupils widened, and she stared at Lethe a beat too long, her eyes flashing from their locked blades to Lethe's face and back again. Then her mouth opened in a hissing snarl, and in the next instant she broke through.

Lethe caught the Cathar's strike again and their blades crackled with energy as they clashed. Blaster fire pealed out, Canderous, and the woman had to deflect it with her saber, barely catching Lethe's next blow in time. Harried, the Cathar began to strike with a renewed fury that bordered on desperation. Lethe batted her attacks away, ignoring the wide openings she could have taken to strike the woman down, and continued to press. Canderous' fire was calculated, and together they herded her towards one of the standing stones, trying to get her cornered.

They were feet from their goal when the woman snarled: "You shall not claim this place, Darth–" a peal of fire interrupted her, and the Cathar yelped like a kicked puppy, pulling her scorched hand towards her chest. Her lightsaber fell to the ground, fizzling and popping where it had been struck useless by a laser bolt.

Lethe heard the heavy tread that had to be Canderous, no longer bothering to mask his presence. "Do you want her cuffed?" His voice, behind and left of her, from where she'd heard the shot.

She was about to say that she thought she could handle it, when the Cathar unexpectedly dropped to her knees.

"Kill me," she said, her wide eyes flicking back and forth, between Lethe and where Canderous was. Her force signature trembled, sending cold tendrils of fear through the debilitating hatred.

Now that she could concentrate on it, Lethe realized the hatred was turned inward, towards the Cathar's own self. It explained the feeling of decay she had felt in the Force. "Why?"

She looked confused, angry, then: "You have defeated me. I am no match for you."

There was the crunch of a trodden branch, Canderous moving forward, and the woman curled into herself, her posture becoming hunted.

"Please. Do not give me to your Mandalorian butcher. I do not know what you want, or why you are here..." Her eyes flicked towards Canderous again, before fixing on Lethe. "But if you know mercy, kill me."

_Peace_, Lethe thought at the bubble of fury that broke in her chest. She had to take several deep breaths before the desire to shake the distraught woman faded, and even then she couldn't dispel the anger she felt at the implication. She spared a glance at Canderous, who looked faintly amused, but mostly disgusted, if Lethe was interpreting the turn of his mouth correctly.

"I don't think he wants you," Lethe said. "Why did you attack me?"

The Cathar's pointed ears flicked in a way a human's never could, an almost feline gesture of curiosity marked by wariness. When she spoke, her voice was pained, loathing, belying the source of her self-hatred. "I came to this place after I struck down my master. I have fallen, but even in my darkness I am weaker than you."

Canderous' earlier words came back to Lethe: _Fall once, fall forever._

Somehow, Lethe couldn't bring herself to believe he was right. She cocked her sword hand, holding her white blade straight out, parallel with the woman's neck now that she was on her knees. "I don't need to kill you." Lethe let her residual anger creep into her words, adding to their harshness. "All I have to do is leave, and your hatred will kill you slowly, from the inside." Then she extended her other hand. "Live."

She heard a harsh intake of breath behind her, and knew Canderous couldn't like the idea of sparing someone he thought was worthless, beyond saving, beyond use. But Lethe herself had been useless due to the strange way the Force had manifested in her, and she refused to believe she couldn't regain the strength she'd lost. It was an imperfect analogy, but…if there was hope for her, why not the Cathar?

The Cathar flinched and lowered her eyes. "I deserve to die for what I did. My poor master…"

"There is no death." This time, Lethe made her voice gentle. "Redeem yourself. Come back with me."

"Do you think that the Order will allow me redemption?" The Cathar spat. "I am not enough of a fool to think that it comes without price!"

"It's not." It had been hard work, learning what the Jedi taught. "You have to want it." For a moment, Lethe was afraid the woman was going to throw herself on her blade, but then she took Lethe's hand, and allowed her to draw her to her feet.

"Shame," Canderous drawled. "I was hoping to see an execution."

The startled look on the woman's face distracted Lethe from the odd chill she felt at the Mandalorian's words. She saw Malak, the high walls of an alien ship, blood, streaking the deckplates, and then the Cathar's face, peering into her own.

"How shall I address you?"

"My name's Lethe," she answered, blinking away the vision. "Lethe Dashao. What's yours?"

* * *

It felt like hours before the Council let out. On returning to the Enclave, Bastila had gone to them at once, taking Juhani with her and closeting her away where Lethe couldn't sit with her and offer comfort. She felt responsible for her, on some level, but she knew almost intuitively when it was pointless to push Bastila. So she waited until the doors to the council chamber opened, and Juhani stepped out. Lethe stood, the motion drawing Juhani's attention. She approached slowly, almost cautiously, as though she were still uncertain how Lethe would treat her presence.

"How'd it go?" Lethe asked.

"They…have accepted me," Juhani said. "I may stay, if I wish. They told me that my master was not killed when I struck her, as I thought. She was only testing me."

"That's…harsh." The word was inadequate to convey how Lethe felt about the tactic as a training method. It was borderline cruel, though she could see why someone would use it.

"Perhaps. But it was a lesson I needed to learn, the last lesson my master had for me. She left, afterwards. She is gone."

There was such a weight of pain and finality in the word _gone_ that the Cathar might as well have been saying her master really was dead. Lethe felt what might have been a sympathetic pang at the sense of loss that only came from having failed a dear master. "What will you do now?" Lethe asked, because there wasn't really anything else to say.

"I do not know. I only know that I may– I must, try to redeem myself. You have given me much to think about." That must have been her way of saying good-bye, because she silently walked away without another word.

"She's going to follow you," Canderous said, coming in behind her.

Turning, Lethe arched an eyebrow at him in question. "I don't even know where I'm going next. What makes you so sure?"

Canderous knew her type. She'd been dar'jetii, and would seize any shadow of a chance to regain her honor. The Cathar were warriors, even if this one had fallen. He shrugged. "I know her type. You could have just killed her and the Jetiise would be just as pleased. She was dar'jetii." Lethe could have just killed all of his own people, too, on Malachor, and the Republic would've been just as pleased. Dar'manda, now, they might even be better off for it.

"She was," Lethe agreed. "But that doesn't mean she has to stay that way. She might even be stronger for it."

"Stronger," Canderous repeated, dubious. Some of them, like Bendak, had still believed in the old god: Kad Ha'rangir, the destroyer who brought growth and change. But when she'd left them for the unknown regions when the clans would've bled for the honor of adopting her, burned their armor and taken the helm when any new Mand'alor would've united the clans under her banner, they were broken. The destruction at Malachor had brought neither growth nor favorable change. Canderous alone had borne witness to the last duel, heard her last words to te Ani'la Mand'alor as she'd wept over his body. And he alone had heard her say she would need them. "Why?" He hadn't meant to ask, but Lethe mistook his meaning.

"I can't speak for the reasoning of Juhani's Master, but if it were me, I wouldn't resort to that kind of tactic unless the threat demanded it. Maybe for Malak, maybe for peace, maybe for whatever, but that Jedi Master probably had a damned good reason for throwing her apprentice to the dark to fend for herself."

Canderous reflexively smothered the pain her words brought up, grinding his jaw on it. If it was a test...

Giving him an all too perceptive look, Lethe walked towards him, her gait the sure, powerful stride of a Taung. "Canderous, what?" In his personal space, she searched his face, gripping his shoulder. "You don't give a swamp rat's ass about Juhani."

Not as such. "She's part of the aliit now."

His non-answer surprised her, and Lethe's grip loosened, her hand sliding down his arm lightly. "You're staying?"

Canderous snorted. She had saved them, and destroyed them, and haunted him for years. He'd be a fool to leave. "Yes."


	9. Dantooine: What Lies Buried

**A/N**: Chapter nine. I hope y'all enjoy.

* * *

"I told you they were trying to turn you into a Jedi," Carth said, once they were back on the _Hawk_.

Lethe sighed. She supposed it really had just been a matter of time. She already dressed and fought like one, and it was a wonder they'd waited as long as they had to ask about the visions, if Bastila saw them too. Lethe had considered telling the Council _'Never send a Jedi to do a criminal's job,'_ but not seriously. "At least they weren't trying to make me a Sith."

Carth's responding scowl told her he didn't appreciate the attempt at levity. He had handled the awkward prying into the visions almost as badly as Master Zhar had– for completely different reasons– and Lethe could almost wish he was a late sleeper, like Mission. Out of the five Jedi who'd been at the early summons– Masters Zhar, Vrook, Vandar, and Dorak, along with Bastila and herself– Lethe was the only one who apparently didn't give a damn what the late Darth Revan had done with her free time. Which was absurd, because it was her head infested with the visions.

"Do you think– should we have invited Bastila? I mean, she looked kind of rough."

She had, at that, but since she'd also refused to do any of the talking Lethe was disinclined to be sympathetic. She tried, anyway, thinking across the bond: _Hey Bastila_, _do you want–_

_Get. Out._

As if their Force bond were a bedroom and Lethe could just shut doors at will. Lethe scrubbed a hand over her face, and plunked down at the table in the _Hawk's _main hold across from Carth. "I don't think she wants to come to breakfast." _And if he starts avoiding me, too, this is going to get very awkward very fast. _Bastila was doing it already, had been doing it ever since she'd woken up. Canderous hadn't been aboard the _Hawk_ earlier when Lethe had come to tell everyone there was a meeting, and Lethe would've appreciated a stoic presence amidst all the arguing and paranoia and speculation that had flown like crazed mynocks.

"Hey guys– woah, who died?" Mission asked, drawing up short at the sight of them as she came in, still in pajamas.

Carth frowned into his caffa and said nothing.

With a soft snort and a roll of her eyes, Lethe spread her hands, said: "Guess who's a Jedi a now?"

Mission squealed in delight and threw herself at her, nearly knocking Lethe off the bench with her bear hug. "This is soooo cool–" She drew back, animated, and then abruptly remembered the dark mood. "Wait, are we not happy? Why aren't we happy?"

"Because," Carth said, "they only want her for her visions of Darth Revan, and she's barely been here a month before they're sending her off to investigate some dark side ruin."

"Whoah." Mission looked at Lethe with wide eyes. "I never knew what your visions were."

And she never would, if Lethe had anything to say about it. Not that they were anything you couldn't find on the holo, but there were things you just didn't explain to fourteen year olds. "They're really not that special, Mission. And anyway," Lethe shot a look at Carth, "I thought the last dark side ruin went pretty well."

Instead of answering, he said: "I'm going to check on breakfast. You don't want it burning," and pushed himself up from the table.

In the vision his words conjured, the air was cold and heavy with moisture, the tarps of their makeshift hooch sending streams of water into the jungle floor under the deluge. "_You're going to burn that_," a striking female Jedi said. Alek's voice, from somewhere behind: "_Just because she never cooks for __**you**__ doesn't mean she can't, Meetra_."

"What's wrong with Carth?" Mission whispered.

Lethe blinked, thought: _Darth Revan, domestic goddess my ass_, and breathed in the aroma of her caffa to clear the residual smell of wet socks from her nose. Maybe the Force was trying to tell her that field rations were the path to the dark side. "He's just worried about everyone's safety, Mission. Dark side ruins are supposed to be really dangerous."

"Oh, I get it." Mission put her hands on her hips. "This is the part where you tell me I can't come, right?"

"We're finally getting off this rock?"

Lethe paused, caffa half-way to her mouth, as Canderous came in from the direction of the boarding ramp. There was blood on the gauntlets and gloves of his armor, answer enough as to where he'd been. Lethe would much rather have been out hunting with him than trying to explain the concept of erotic asphyxiation to the Jedi Council. Wondering where she'd gone wrong that this was her life, Lethe went back to her caffa. "Nope. The Council wants a ruin investigated."

"Lethe's a Jedi," Mission said, trying and not managing to sound off-hand.

"Of course she is." Canderous shot a look at the galley, then said: "Someone tell me Fleet's not cooking."

Mission giggled. "Who, Carth? He couldn't cook a salad. Not that you can talk, Mr. Alcohol-is-a-food-group-Ordo."

Lethe hid her grin in her mug.

"Lethe made breakfast."

Taking off the gloves, Canderous looked at Lethe, an amused eyebrow cocked and his mouth quirked up in rare humor. "You cook."

* * *

"Someone has to make sure the doors don't slam shut and trap you," Mission said. "It happens in all the holovids."

"_When the danger is great, many are better than one,"_ Zaalbar said.

Carth shot an imploring look at Lethe.

"I actually agree with her." Mission already knew both how to handle herself in a situation, and when the situation was too much for her to handle. Besides which, Lethe had a feeling the tomb they were about to investigate wouldn't be the only one she and her friends would have to deal with, and if there was one thing the Jedi taught it was to listen to your intuition. They were all just going to have to get used to dangerous situations, and the idea of each other being in them.

Mission beamed, and looked at Canderous, who chuckled. "Blue's right, it does happen in all the holovids. You're outvoted, Republic."

Carth threw his hands up in defeat. "Fine, fine. But I'm not going to be the one to explain it to Bastila."

"_You underestimate the logic of the Jedi, Carth_._"_

"You might be overestimating the logic of Bastila," he muttered.

The Jedi herself appeared at that moment, coming from around the corner of the Enclave. "Really, Commander, is that any way to speak of a member of the Order?"

Bastila's testy mood came across more strongly in person, like a layer of oil occluding her rising unease. She hadn't wanted to be sent out to investigate the ruin with Lethe any more than Carth had wanted the Jedi sending them out, and Lethe felt, again, inexplicably guilty. It wasn't like she'd forced the bond on Bastila, though you'd never know from how the young Padawan acted. Lethe found herself pinching the bridge of her nose. "The first person to start fighting gets to give the report to Master Vrook."

That got mostly cooperative looks, with a mournful _dwoo_ from T3 as they started off.

Lethe found the silence soothing, but apparently Bastila didn't. The further they walked, the more anxious she became until she finally blurted aloud: "I sense that it will be a place of darkness."

Mission rolled her eyes. "Isn't that like the point of Sith?"

"Don't," Lethe said, pointing a finger at Bastila when she was about to retort to Mission's snark.

"I don't get it." Carth's eyebrows furrowed. "If this tomb is so dark, why didn't the Council find it in all the years they've been on Dantooine?"

"They did." Bastila sniffed, peevish if not outright hostile. "The Jedi Order does not treat corrupted ruins lightly. If Lethe and I had not shared a vision of Revan and Malak entering these ruins, they might have remained safely untouched. As it is, they may prove instrumental in unlocking the secret of defeating the Sith."

Carth scoffed. "So they just left it there for people to stumble on, not knowing what they were getting themselves into?"

"Revan and Malak were hardly unknowing! They had already fallen to the dark side when they sought this place out!"

In her peripheral vision, Lethe saw Canderous sign with his hand: _My credits say the princess throws the first punch_.

Despite being irritated, Lethe managed a smile, and signed: _She totally will._

"And if the Council knew that, why weren't they watching him?" Carth asked.

"Him?" Lethe, Canderous, and Bastila asked at the same time.

"Revan was a man." Carth looked between the three of them. "Everyone knows that."

"_I have also heard that Revan was a man_," Zaalbar said. "_Though the rumors surrounding him were many."_

"Revan was definitely a woman." Carth had been there when Lethe had described the visions with Malak; she'd thought it was obvious they were in a relationship. "And anyway, how would Revan and Malak even– oh." She blinked. "Huh."

Canderous let out a deep laugh, shaking his head.

Remembering that he had mentioned Malachor, seemed to've been there, Lethe asked, curiously: "Did you ever see Revan fight?"

"This must be the tomb." Bastila's voice was false cheer over near panic.

It looked exactly as it had in the visions. It was made of some dark, ancient stone, half buried in one of the hillsides. While it looked incongruous with the grassy fields and summer wild flowers around them, Lethe didn't think that it put off the amount of dark side energy Bastila had seemed to be expecting. "Does anyone else feel like this is anticlimactic?"

Mission raised her hand.

"Don't be so certain," Bastila said. "I'm sure all will be made clearer once we've opened it."

In the Force vision her words conjured, Malak was still whole. "_If we go in, we can never go back_," he said, the words so close Lethe almost thought he was standing there. She felt a sudden, fierce pang of compassion, and was reaching to touch his unmarred jaw before she realized what she was doing. Canderous stood there, expressionless except for the quirk of an amused eyebrow. Lethe dropped her hand, and turned back to the tomb quickly, gesturing at it. "I guess we should –"

The doors opened with a rumbling sound like boulders scraping together in an avalanche, and Lethe felt the darkness that was inside beckon to her. _Yeah_, she thought, _no_. "Anyone have a wrist light?"

Two of them must have, because three beams– T3's being the other– cut into the tomb's dark interior, illuminating its depths. "Great. T3 out front. Those of you with lights, stick close to those without." Lethe activated her lightsaber as she entered, and heard the crack and hum of another as Bastila did the same. Her own colorless blade cast a faint puddle of light around her, augmented by the others' lights. The tomb was largely untouched, covered in thick layers of dust except for straight down the center of the chamber, where a finer layer said someone had recently disturbed it. "Did the Council send someone else?"

Bastila answered that there had been one knight who had never reported back, some time ago. Lethe nodded, and directed T3 towards the far doors.

The Jedi who'd come before them was there, dead on the stone floors. He'd been there long enough for rigor mortis to set in. There was nothing else but a strange, spider like droid occupying the center of the chamber. Lethe approached it cautiously, aware it was the most likely cause of the Jedi's death. As she drew near, it began speaking in an alien language she didn't recognize. "Anyone catch that?" she asked over her shoulder.

T3 made an offensive sound, but no one else responded, and the droid spoke again in something that Lethe recognized as the language of the Tuskan raiders, though she didn't understand it. Bastila said something painfully obvious about the droid cycling through languages.

"_I can reproduce any language spoken by the slaves of the builders."_

"That's Ancient Selkath."

"I never heard of the Selkath being slaves," Lethe said.

"_Communication was vital to ensure that the slaves constructed this temple according to the wishes of the builders. You are not of the slave species. Neither are you of the builders. You are like the ones who came before."_

"It must be referring to Revan and Malak," Bastila said, "They must have encountered this droid when they came here."

Painfully obvious, and haughty, and masking that rising unease. It was getting to the point where it was distracting, and Lethe did feel bad for the younger woman. She'd probably been raised on ghost stories of the ruin, to hear her talk about it, and it was obvious that being here with only Lethe, and no proper Jedi, had her close to panic. Though the idea of sharing herself on purpose left a bad taste in Lethe's mouth, she tried to convey a sense of assurance, of solidarity, through the bond. It was clumsy, at first, but gradually she felt the other woman relax, somewhat. _It's alright,_ Lethe thought at her. _If anything's even a little suspicious, Carth will pick up on it. No one's going dark side today._ After a moment, she felt her emotional support returned to her across the bond. Lethe turned back to the droid, and tried not to think too much about the gentle warmth of Bastila's gratitude. "The ones who came before, what did they want?"

"_They sought knowledge of the Star Map, to lead them to the Star Forge."_

A glance at the others told Lethe she wasn't the only one who'd never heard of a Star Forge. So she asked the obvious question: "What is the Star Forge?"

"_The Star Forge is the glory of the builders, the apex of their infinite empire. It is a machine of invincible might, a tool of unstoppable conquest._"

"Sounds like it doesn't know, either," Carth said.

"So these builder people made a temple to their Star Thingy using slaves? What were they, old-school Sith?"

"I'm not sure, Mission," Lethe said, considering the droid. Further questioning uncovered nothing useful, other than vague clues as to the machine and its culture of origin's age, until it insinuated that only those who survived the tests in two adjacent chambers would be deemed worthy to receive the 'Star Map.'

"This will go faster if we clear those rooms in pairs," Lethe said. "Bastila, you and Zaalbar take that room; Carth and I will take this one. Mission, Canderous, make sure that droid doesn't try anything funny. And keep talking to it; see if you can get it to cough up anything on the builders. T3 will help you."

They nodded, and split off as Lethe struck out for the corridor on the far left side of the ruin.

Just before she reached the door, Lethe reached out with her senses to try to feel with the Force what was behind it. At first, there was nothing. It was like looking through dark water, or into dark glass, but gradually her senses penetrated it and she could feel…intelligence. Cold, inhuman intelligence, waiting like a coiled trap.

"There's at least one droid in there," she told Carth. "It's…to the right. Against the wall. Ready?"

"Ready," Carth said, drawing both pistols, and Lethe opened the door.

The droid was just where she'd felt it, a heavily armored type she wasn't familiar with that opened fire immediately. Lethe deflected its blasts, the thrumming blade of her white saber cutting through the stale air and leaving traces of brightness across her vision. Now would be a really good time to know some of those combat techniques the Jedi hadn't taught her– crushing droids, blowing things up– as Lethe's best assault couldn't penetrate the droid's shielding. Suddenly, it let out a blaze of fire, superheating the stale tomb air as it streamed towards Carth.

Lethe reacted without thinking, throwing out her hand instinctively and grasping at the fire with the Force. It boiled towards her, away from its intended target, but Lethe tightened her hand and _pushed_. She caught the fire, holding it as if in her hand, a steady stream blazing and roiling out from the droid and gathering at her open palm. Lethe seized it and lashed out with the stolen fire, sent it coiling around the droid like a whip. When she pulled with the Force, the droid blew into smithereens.

Shrapnel flew, but now Lethe had the Force up in a shield, bright and blue and glowing against the fire and smoke billowing out of the wreckage. In moments, it died to a slow, stinking burn, and Lethe let go of the Force along with the breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. The adrenaline coursing through her made her jittery, twitchy, but the sound of Carth's cough pulled Lethe back into the moment.

Carth was blinking at the sting of smoke, but he was otherwise unhurt. "Wow." He coughed again, shaking his head. "That was…that was something else. I've never seen anything like it. Are you okay?"

She felt ill. What she'd just done had just...come to her, like muscle memory. It was a sudden and unexpected command of power that Lethe wasn't sure how she should feel about. She'd never learned whatever that had been, and hoped it wasn't because of the tomb. She didn't think so, but…the dark side was supposed be seductive and subtle, wasn't it? She turned away, hoping nothing showed on her face, and picked her way towards the computer console against the wall. She could handle it, she decided. The last thing she needed was a full force inquisition courtesy of the Jedi. She _would _handle it. "Fine," Lethe lied. "You?"

"I'm good."

"Good." Lethe put her datapad into the console. It processed the language contained there, and then asked Lethe a slew of questions about life-giving world types that made her frown. The innocuousness of the questions coupled with the creeping dark of the tomb felt wrong. "Do you get this?"

She felt the warmth off Carth's body as he leaned over her shoulder to look at the console. "No. That's weird."

"That's what I thought." Frowning, Lethe punched in the answers and retrieved her datapad before leading the way back to the central chamber where Bastila and Zaalbar were just gathering.

Bastila's nerves were spiking again, carrying through the bond like a dry chill. "Come," she said. "We should conclude our business here quickly."

They must have proved worthy, because the doors to the final chamber opened before them. Inside, was a metal device that opened like a dark lotus and spilled glyphs and hyperspace equations into a rotating sphere.

"This looks like some kind of interplanetary chart," Bastila said. "Revan and Malak must have used it to find the Star Forge."

"It's beautiful." Carth, sounding stunned that something so dark could be so perfect.

"_I have never seen its like,"_ Zaalbar agreed.

Lethe understood how they felt. The bright symbols spinning over her head were like music to her eyes: alien, haunting. She had to physically shake the feeling of wonder, and quickly uploaded what she could to her datapad. It wasn't as beautiful, condensed to coordinates and calculations, but it was what a navicomputer could read. "It's incomplete."

"Yes, but these other planets: Manaan, Tatooine, Kashyyyk, and Korriban, they may hold additional clues. We should inform the Council of our findings at once."

"What happened in the other room?"

"_There was a droid guarding an alien computer. It asked questions about death-giving planets."_

There was a reason for the tests, and as much as Lethe agreed they should leave quickly, she had a feeling it was important. "Anything?" she asked the others when they were back in the central chamber.

Mission shifted on her feet and looked at Canderous.

"It wasn't cooperating, so I told T3 to interface with it. It objected." Canderous grinned. "I insisted."

Lethe looked at the spider-droid, which had appeared to be standing guard, motionless. On closer inspection, she could see that someone had made a rat's nest of the wiring underneath it. T3 swiveled his head towards her, and made a series of honks and blatts that was eerily similar to the laughter of a humanoid child. She shook her head, amused. "Are we getting anything useful out of it?"

The wiring sparked, and T3 made another rude noise, and then the droid said: _"Worthiness is assessed by the subject's demonstration of the knowledge of the builders."_

"That doesn't make any sense," Carth objected. "The tests were just a bunch of stuff about planet types."

"_Before accessing the Star Map, the subject must prove capable of understanding the Star Forge's functions."_

"Okay, what?"

"_The Star Forge is the glory of the builders; only those worthy of using it to its full potential may gain knowledge of its splendor."_

Lethe cocked her head, narrowing her eyes. "What is its full potential?"

T3 did something to the droid again, and it said: _"It is a tool of boundless power, the realization of the infinite empire, a means of pure creation."_

"This thing is coming with us," Lethe said with finality.

* * *

It was much later, after an even longer Council session, when Lethe returned to the _Hawk _with her droid. She stopped in the arch of the garage's door way, and knocked on the frame, since there wasn't an actual door.

Canderous turned and lifted his visor, shutting off the torch he was using to work on his armor. He gave Lethe an amused look, and said, drily, "It's open."

Lethe found herself smiling. "I was wondering if I could keep my droid in here." The only other room with the space for it was the cargo hold, but Bastila had fussed over the idea, insisting she and Lethe would spend the majority of their time aboard dueling and would need adequate space for it, until Lethe had thrown up her hands and agreed to try elsewhere. She was pretty sure she could crack the droid's stubborn carapace with enough time and help from T3, and despite Bastila's sudden interest in sparring with her Lethe anticipated having a lot of down time. Enough, Lethe hoped, to figure out the crawling feeling the droid gave her, a feeling like old air gusting over the back of her neck.

Canderous eyed her. "It's your ship."

Not under any legitimate law Lethe could think of, even if she did think of it as her own. But that didn't give her license to start encroaching on everyone else's already cramped space. With Juhani joining them on their newly assigned quest to find the Star Forge, it meant there were more crew than there were free beds, not counting the med-bay. "It's your room." Lethe leaned her hip against the doorjamb.

Canderous looked at the pink krayt dragon– Mission's– taking up the entire back seat of the air speeder pointedly. But he only said: "Alright." When she didn't leave immediately, he asked: "Did you want something else?"

Lethe did. If there was a reason the Force was showing her the visions it did, then it followed there was a reason Canderous had set them off so often on Taris. Lethe suspected, from what she'd seen and what the Jedi had said about 'the Force moving in mysterious ways,' that the Mandalorian wars were somehow integral to what she was supposed to be doing. "A war story."

"Your visions." When Lethe nodded, Canderous sighed, putting the torch down and taking off his protective visor. "Alright; I'll humor you. Maybe I should tell you about what happened with the Cathar. It'll explain a few things."

"About Juhani, you mean." Unfolding herself from the doorway, Lethe came all the way into the garage and perched on the edge of the speeder.

Canderous grunted, and leaned back against the workbench. "Don't be surprised if she never gets used to me. The Mandalorians didn't just conquer the Cathar homeworld; we decimated it. Cassus Fett commanded the assault. We used our ships to destroy their orbital facilities and bombard the surface, to rain fire over the expanse of whole continents. Seas boiled. Mountains were leveled. They gave us battle, before it was over, glorious battle. But by the time we rode our basilisk war droids to the surface, they were long doomed. Cassus had the survivors herded into the water and executed en masse. Less than a handful of them are left, now."

Lethe almost thought she saw it– choppy water, the press of bodies, the stench of terror– but then it was gone. She blinked. That hadn't exactly been the tale of daring-do she'd been expecting. "You don't sound proud of the victory."

"There's a difference between victory and genocide. They were already beaten; another species in the same situation would've been offered brotherhood, given how well they fought. A few of them, the unlucky ones," Canderous made a disgusted face, "they were offered chains. It wasn't worthy of us."

Canderous' code of honor and brotherhood resonated with Lethe. She understood, on an internal level she couldn't quite put her finger on, what it was to transcend through war. The Republic to her was an idea, an ideal, a world that existed in the hearts and minds of the people sworn to defend it. They fought for the galaxy that should be, because they still believed that it could be. Lethe didn't think there was a greater honor, or calling, than to give everything for the galaxy's apotheosis. The Mandalorians called it the fight against oblivion. She thought it was largely the same thing. But half of what he was saying didn't add up. Lethe cocked her head to the side, curious. "The other day, when I beat Juhani, you said you were hoping to see an execution. So she showed cowardice, but fought well and came back with me despite it. Wouldn't killing her have been like what Fett did?"

Canderous' eyebrows shot up, as if he were either surprised she remembered or surprised to be called on the seeming double-standard. "That's…a story for another time. Is there something else you want to know?"

There was, but Lethe had already used up what was left of her self-allotted free time, and she needed to make sure the _Hawk _and her crew were prepared to leave in the morning. Juhani would have to be moved in, and Lethe needed to check in on everyone else while the relative excitement at getting underway still ran high. "No. Not for now, anyway. Thanks."

He nodded, and turned back to his armor. "Your pilot was arguing on the comm with some Admiral, earlier. You might want to check on him first."

"How did–" Lethe started, but Canderous chuckled, interrupting her.

"I know your type. Go on, do your talking thing."

Lethe rolled her eyes as she pushed herself off the air speeder with a grin. Her talking thing. _Fair enough_, Lethe thought as she went to find Carth.

She found him in the cockpit, arguing about their charted course with Bastila. So much for relative excitement; if this was day zero than Lethe couldn't imagine the bickering after a week in the hyperspace lanes. "Alright, enough. What's the issue here?"

Carth and Bastila both turned their heads towards her, so engrossed in their argument that they hadn't even noticed her. "Bastila wants to go to Korriban first," Carth said, folding his arms.

"Absolutely not. Korriban will be the most dangerous world we visit, and none of us are ready for that yet." Besides which, the mere mention of Korriban gave Lethe a funny sort of feeling, a hunch that said: not yet. Intuition, maybe, or the Force, more likely. Lethe had had enough of it taking license with her head to follow a hunch on faith. She couldn't explain it better, so she tried to project it at Bastila.

Bastila's perfect eyebrows shot up. But then, slowly, she said: "It would seem I'm outnumbered on the issue." No one mentioned that there were four other people on board who might like a say in the matter. "I shall assist Juhani in moving her things aboard. Excuse me." She brushed against the bulkheads on her way past, stiffening her back to avoid touching either of them in the close space.

Lethe put it from her mind and looked at Carth. "How're you holding up?"

He laughed humorlessly, shaking his head. "We haven't even left yet and that woman is driving me insane. I can't imagine what it'll be like after a week in space."

With a smile for his unintended echoing of her thoughts, Lethe asked: "So you're coming for sure?"

"Yeah." Carth sank into the pilot's chair, suddenly looking exhausted. "I called Dodanna. Admiral Dodanna, my superior. She wasn't too happy about it, said we couldn't really afford to lose officers right now, but then when I explained– not fully, I think the Jedi must've already contacted her or someone– that I would be accompanying Bastila, she said she was glad someone she trusted was on board." He shook his head. "I don't know why she'd say that. I mean…sure, she doesn't _know_ Bastila, but you'd think she'd trust her, her being a Jedi and all. She said this mission had the utmost priority."

"You don't sound happy about it." Not that he should; top priority was just a fancy way of saying likely to end in death. "You could've gotten reassigned."

Carth sighed, worn down and agitated. "Yeah. Except no, not really. When– when Saul left I was…furious. When he gave the order to have Telos destroyed…vengeance is all that's kept me going. But I'm not him." He looked up at her. "And you're not, either. I've got the feeling neither of us are in the habit of walking out when we're needed. And, well, that's about the size of it. You need a good pilot. I'm the best there is."


	10. Space-Manaan: A Criminal's Job

**A/N:** Thank you, TurtleOne, for stopping by. Oh, and, hey: new pov in this chapter. It gives me an evil chuckle.

* * *

Intellectually, Lethe knew it couldn't completely be her fault that the fighting started, but it had all started with her. Mission, bored out of her mind, had asked Lethe to show her how to cook. The girl took to it with alacrity, and between the two of them– if anyone else had a knack for it, they were wisely keeping silent to avoid the chore– communal meals had become a tradition.

That wasn't what started the fighting, but it provided the opportunity.

Lethe and Canderous had drawn the short straws on clearing up from dinner. It was a fair enough routine, and gave them all something to gamble on the occasion Mission could sucker the crew into playing pazaak. As they were putting dishes away, Lethe asked Canderous to tell her a war story. It had become a thing by this point, and the story of Canderous' first battle and the Basilisk war droids had turned into a conversation about AI over one of Davik's bottles of green gin from Malastair, which had turned into a slightly inebriated if good-natured argument over who had the better weaponry – the Mandalorians or the Republic – when Carth walked in.

"Fleet!" Canderous made a _join us_ gesture with his glass. "You fought in the Mandalorian wars. What did you think of our weaponry compared to your Republic's?"

Carth didn't join them. "I try not to think about my past battles too much. The horrors of war are something I'd prefer not to relive."

"The 'horrors of war'? My people know only the glory of battle! I'm disappointed in you Carth; I thought a warrior like you would understand."

This, Lethe thought with at least a bit of drunken humor, was going to end badly. She drained her glass, and poured herself another, and wondered if she'd make it worse by getting involved.

"I'm not a warrior. I'm a soldier. There's a difference. Warriors attack and conquer, they– they prey on the weak. Soldiers defend and protect the innocent – mostly from warriors!" Carth was speaking in the short, clipped sentences that meant his fuse was dwindling, his volume and pitch starting to rise in irritation.

"Nice speech." There was more sneer than sarcasm in Canderous' voice, but Lethe had gotten to know him well enough by now to read injury when she heard it. "I'll bet you tell yourself that every night so you can sleep. But I accept who and what I am, I don't have to justify it with words – victory in battle is my justification!"

"Justification through victory? So what happens when you lose – you know, like you did to us?"

"We lost to _Revan_, not your simpering Republic, and we still made it tremble before we fell!" Canderous said, rising.

Carth took a step forward, and Lethe decided it was time to interpose herself before they could start hosing down the decks with testosterone. She stood, and stopped Canderous by bracing a hand against his chest. "Stop," she told them, turning to Carth right in the middle of his retort. "Or I'll sic Bastila on you both." She swung her glare on Canderous, who only smirked, and downed his drink.

Another look at Carth showed his hands clenched into fists, his jaw stiff and a muscle in his cheek jumping. "I think you've had enough to drink, Lethe. Come on. I'll walk you to your room."

Oh, no. Lethe wasn't drunk enough to go for that one. Acquiescing would be to let herself become the bone of contention, and refusing would do the same thing as well as put an unneeded wall up between her and Carth. He had put her in a very awkward position, and they were going to have a conversation about it just as soon as Lethe could do so without appearing to be taking sides. _A little help, here?_ She thought at Bastilla through the bond, and felt Bastila's curiosity and mild irritation as she came out of her meditative trance.

Thankfully, the Jedi appeared within seconds. Bastila looked at the nearly empty bottle of gin, then between the two men, and frowned a frown that was both serene and disapproving, like a governess walking in on a caper. "We are close enough to Manaan that a request to land would not be amiss, Carth." Bastila gave the bottle a disapproving look. "And it wouldn't do for that to remain where Mission might find it." She looked at Canderous, who picked the bottle up and carried it towards the garage, whistling what sounded like a battle cadence; and then at Carth, who stalked towards the communications room, muttering. She raised her dark eyebrows at Lethe. "I'd ask what on earth that was about, but there wouldn't be any point. Do tell me you weren't goading them, Lethe."

Lethe let out an irritated breath. "Please. We were having a drink and telling war stories, and then Canderous asked Carth if he wanted to join." In not so many words; Canderous spoke Mando'a even in galactic basic. That Carth had probably been hearing Canderous try to degrade whatever scars he still carried from the wars was something Lethe should've picked up on sooner. She rubbed at a spot on her forehead at a sudden throb that threatened to turn migraine, and then quit when she realized it was a habit of Master Zhar's that she shouldn't know about, barring the visions. "How unethical would it be to Force-persuade them to like each other?"

"I'd advise against it. The art of suggestion is delicate, and such an endeavor could easily result in indelicate…results."

Lethe put her face in her palm at the visual. Any designs on sleep she'd had for the next week went out the airlock.

Bastila sighed, probably feeling her frustration through the bond. "But I take your point. I'm afraid Canderous means to see this mission to its conclusion, for whatever reason. Carth will simply have to come to terms with his presence. He might take a lesson from Juhani on that account. Shall I speak to him?"

"I will."

Bastila nodded. "Before he locks himself in the cockpit for the rest the trip, if you please."

Lethe took her point, but decided to give him a minute before making for the communications room. Instead, she went to the garage first, and knocked on the door frame.

Canderous turned from laying out his bedroll, cinching the straps on his equipment pack back down as he straightened with an exasperated look. "I'm not your jumpy pilot. Come in when you want something; I don't bite."

The gravel-edge of amusement in the word _bite_ was a throwback to the first time she'd spoken to him on Taris: his brief, feral grin that had nearly been a snarl, and an unplaceable sense of déjà vu. _A hard voice suddenly silenced_, she'd thought, inexplicably. With a confused frown, Lethe came in and settled against the workbench. "You met Revan, didn't you?"

Momentary surprise flickered across Canderous' face. "I was on the Mand'alor's flagship when they dueled and on Malachor at the formal surrender, yes. But we never spoke."

"I thought I remembered you." The words weren't out of Lethe's mouth before the throb in her head picked up again, and she closed her eyes, briefly, to let it settle. "Taris is a little fuzzy, and the trip to Dantooine is even worse, but I thought…" she trailed off as she opened her eyes to see what looked like pain just under the surface of the expressionless look that settled over Canderous' face. Wondering if she should drop it, Lethe finished carefully: "I thought I remembered seeing you in a vision." While there was probably some great and mysterious purpose of the Force at work, landing her with visions of Revan and possibly the sole living Mandalorian who'd fought her and lived, Lethe was really just curious about Canderous. She enjoyed his company, and hadn't been ready to end their evening.

Instead of giving her any indication, verbal or otherwise, that she should back off, Canderous simply asked: "What vision?"

"I assume it was the flagship." It certainly wasn't Malachor, what Lethe remembered. By all accounts the planet was a wasteland: a mass grave of all those who'd died as a result of the Republic's super weapon. "You were there. You looked like you'd been in a fight." He'd looked a few minutes from bleeding out, but Canderous was still enough of a stranger that Lethe was wary of injuring his pride.

The brief smile that broke on his face was almost nostalgic, and when he spoke it was softly, almost…warmly. "I had the honor of being defeated by Revan in single combat."

He'd said something once about getting in better fights than kinrath. Quite an understatement, if he'd gotten trounced by Revan and was still alive to talk about it. "How did you manage to survive?"

Canderous' answering gaze was weighing, as if he was deciding whether or not to say, and Lethe pushed herself on top of the workbench, waiting for the story. After a moment, he said: "Revan healed me."

"I guess I should be grateful to her, then." Lethe didn't ask why, since she was certain it would be taken the wrong way, but she wondered: the woman hadn't done random mercy; history was clear on that point.

Canderous looked away. "I'm sure Carth could tell you stories about the wars."

Lethe was sure he couldn't, since the scars would always be wounds to him, and not badges of honor. She said so, hoping understanding would lead to less in-fighting over the course of their mission. "And anyway," she added, "he's not you. The crew wouldn't be the same."

The only response Canderous gave was a look Lethe couldn't quite identify: sidelong, searching and unreadable.

She changed the subject. "How does a Mandalorian general end up on the flagship, anyway? Shouldn't you have been leading your own ships closer to the action?"

"Yes; I should have." Canderous settled against the wall next to her, something like remembered anger undercutting his tone. "After Cathar things…were not the same. Our tactics as a people grew strange and without honor. I disagreed with Cassus Fett over them on several occasions throughout the years of the campaign, aggressively. Eventually, in order to take my command out from under me, he had me appointed to the Mand'alor's Five. It wasn't an honor I could turn down. The command passed to my wife, as my second, after that."

"Your wife." Lethe hadn't thought there was a woman, since Canderous never mentioned any, but she'd certainly never asked, either.

She was still trying to unravel how she felt about it when Canderous said: "Veela Ordo. We're shukla riduurok."

_A broken love_, roughly translated into basic. Divorced. "Oh." The relief, Lethe could recognize only too well, and _that_ she couldn't decide how she felt about. Or how Bastila would feel about it, since she picked up on all of Lethe's emotions sooner or later. Rather than examine it, she changed the subject, again. "What was it like, fighting Revan?"

"I'll show you sometime, if we ever pick up a battle axe. We'll be landing within the next forty-eight hours."

Lethe grinned, both at the idea of reenacting and being flattered at the implication she could fight well enough to be Revan. But the gauge of how far out they were from Manaan reminded her she needed to talk to Carth, still. Hopping off the workbench, she said: "I'll look forward to it. Maybe I'll beat you this time."

Canderous' laughter followed Lethe out of the garage.

Carth was just taking out the earpiece after sending the message when she walked into the communications room. He made an irritated noise and ran a hand through his hair. "Look," he said, "I know I was out of line, again. And I know I owe you an apology, again. But I'm not going to be sorry for trying to protect you from that monster!"

Monster, was it? Instead of going to Canderous' defense, Lethe breathed in and thought: _Peace, _folding her arms and drumming the fingers of her right hand against her other bicep. "What makes you think I need to be protected?" She left the implied '_from Canderous' _unspoken, because that way led to fighting and Lethe wasn't up for it.

Carth went there anyway. "Have you not heard the way he talks about Revan? The man practically worshipped her. He's a bad influence, and it doesn't take a Force-sensitive to know he bleeds dark side blood!"

"The darkest thing I've seen him do on this ship is clean his repeater at the table." Before, there had been the one complaint about not killing people he deemed cowards, but Canderous had stopped that after Juhani. Something Lethe still needed to ask him about, later. The thought that she was starting to forget things washed all the irritation and anger out Lethe, replacing it with fatigue. She sighed, and scrubbed a hand over her face. Sometimes it felt like the only one on the ship without at least one issue was T3, and it wouldn't surprise Lethe if he came down with some ancient terminal virus from spending so much time interfaced with the builder droid.

"That's not what I meant. After some of the things I've seen…" Carth trailed off, shaking his head. He looked as tired as Lethe felt. "It's like the dark side is this thing out there, waiting to catch Jedi and destroy them. I don't want that to happen to you. This mission, to find this 'Star Forge,' to stop Malak: it's bigger than we are. The Jedi have some big fate planned for you, and I worry about what it could take. I'll protect you from it if I can, but I might not always be there."

"Don't talk like that." Lethe's chest clenched at the implication, and she uncrossed her arms and went to lean against the wall across from him. It was hard to be irritated when he was only trying to protect her– in his paranoid, overprotective sort of way– from something he didn't even understand. "If you're worried about the dark side being like a flu I can catch, you don't have to. I don't think it works like that, and I don't think the light side is about shutting yourself up and hiding from everything in the world, either. I don't plan to turn into that person just because I'm also a Jedi now."

"I wouldn't want you to." Some of the tension went out of Carth, and he relaxed against the console. "I just worry, that's all."

He certainly seemed worried, still. It occurred to Lethe that they were not as close as they'd been. It made her sad, especially since she knew her friendship with Canderous was partly to blame. Though it probably wouldn't help, she offered: "You could join us, you know."

"Thanks, but no." Carth made a face. "I forget about the war, where I can. There's enough of it to go around these days, anyway. Do you ever– do you ever wonder if it would've been different? If Revan and Malak hadn't turned?"

His question brought the sharp scent of ocean, the dim, green lights of an underwater facility, and Malak's voice, saying: "_You turned on me that day at Malachor, Revan_." And she was reaching towards him, again, saying: "Don't–" as he stepped through a pressure door wearing an oxygen suit.

"Lethe?" Carth looked confused, concern and apology evident in his voice as he took a step forward.

She dropped her hand, shaking her head to clear it. The Manaan map was underwater. She wondered if Bastila had seen it, too. "I'm fine. Just a vision. Don't worry about it."

Carth was worrying about it. The self-recrimination was evident in every line of his face and bearing. "Are you sure?"

With a nod, Lethe said: "I'm sure." She tried to smile reassuringly around the pain starting to build between her eyes. "I promise. I just have to talk to Bastila. Goodnight, Carth."

* * *

After that, life on the _Hawk_ was slightly less tense, but it was still a relief when they finally reached Manaan. Bastila proposed they each take twenty-four hours to recuperate and reconnoiter before meeting back at the _Hawk_ to construct a plan for finding the Star Map, and everyone readily agreed.

Lethe left the ship in the closest thing she owned to civilian wear: her ancient fatigue pants, dyed over grey, a white shirt, and her only pair of boots. The private docking bay allotted to the _Hawk_ connected to a hallway, and the imbedded security system notified her that everything outside their hangar was under Manaan surveillance before the doors slid open.

The first corner she turned revealed a green skinned Twi'lek in black armor. He addressed her in Ryl. "_I've been looking for you, Lethe Dashao. My name is Senni Vek, and we have heard of your exploits. Hulas the Rodian would meet with you here on Manaan. Mind you go alone._"

Then he took off at a run, leaving Lethe to wonder what it was with people and sending her messengers.

* * *

There was an old military adage that said the best and the worst officers always died first. It wasn't without merit. Saul Karath had his failings, and he knew them well; at the moment, it was indecision he wrestled with. As a younger man, the choice would've been an easy one: he had acted quickly and decisively in all things earlier in his career, but the long years serving as Darth Malak's hand would have been enough to change anyone. The current Sith Lord would be arriving shortly, and Saul had little time to come to a decision. Returning his attention to the bounty hunter standing before him, Saul asked: "You're absolutely certain?"

The man's eyes were hidden behind thick, dark goggles, and it was impossible to read them. "I know what I see, Admiral." His face betrayed nothing.

Saul nodded shortly. If the man had merely been mistaken, it would be a simpler matter. As it was, Saul wanted to execute him on the spot and have the body incinerated, but he'd made the mistake of granting him an audience on the command deck, and his junior officers had heard everything. Once, Saul would've done anything to preserve the men he now fundamentally distrusted. It was an irony of the Sith mindset– or mind control, as it were– that was not lost on him. "Very well. I'll speak with Lord Malak on your behalf once he is aboard. My aide will show you to temporary quarters." He signaled to the lieutenant standing by at parade rest, and then turned his attention to the view port, removing his cap briefly before flipping it back onto his head. It was the smallest but most constant thing that he detested about his current position. Saul missed his Republic combination cover, and knew it was partially in self-distraction.

She was alive. He hadn't thought it possible. But did it change anything?

"_You've gotten soft, Saul."_

_Saul froze, his hand still poised in the air from tossing his dress overcoat over the back of a chair. In the dark, he hadn't noticed he wasn't alone._

_Darth Revan stepped out of the shadows of his living quarters, holding the red mask in her hand like an identification badge. As if there could be any mistaking her face, from someone who'd seen it. "You're gawking, Saul."_

_Saul shut his mouth with a snap. The former hero and now greatest enemy of the Republic was standing in his living room. He wasn't armed, not that it would have made a difference. "I hadn't planned on entertaining. Tell me, Darth, do you take brandy?"_

_Revan laughed, a low, rich sound that made the hair on the back of Saul's neck rise. "Always the gentleman. I don't have time for idle conversation, unfortunately. I'm here to make you Darth Malak's second in command. Not as his Sith apprentice, as his Admiral. You'll have power of course, enough to raze worlds if you wanted."_

"_Oh." Saul found himself pouring a double, for something to do with his hands. "Is that all? Why would you want a loyal Republican for a second to your apprentice?" Not that his loyalties were unshakable; naturally he'd considered joining Revan's Sith, as he had mistrusted the Jedi since the passing of his father. And she was strong: stronger than the Republic, stronger than the Mandalorians…stronger than the Sith, even, if she wasn't on their side._

"_Because if he manages to betray me like a good Sith apprentice, I'll need someone who isn't a raving lunatic in a position of power." _

"_Why?"_

_Revan actually rolled her eyes. "To overthrow him, of course."_

_Saul considered this. He knew that with the fleet in ruins, Revan's way was the best hope for peace. The galaxy would not be the same, but it would be united and impregnable to such threats as the detested Mandalorians had posed. Bringing his flagship and command under Revan would certainly spare his men the fate that had already come to the rest of the fleet. He could hardly say no. He suspected Revan knew as much, already. In fact it wouldn't surprise him if she'd been reading his mind the entire while. "I'll need details on this coup you hope I'll never have to stage."_

_Revan smiled, and took a rolled sheet of flimsiplast from the folds of her dark robes. "I assume you've heard of my Academy."_


End file.
